art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

18
However, art-e-conomy avoids a traditionalist (art-historical) usage of the term
‘curating’, where it is broadly synonymous with the practices of “exhibiting art” or
“mediating between artists and the audience/collectors/gallerists, etc”. Instead,
one would rather repeatedly claim that curating, in a contemporary (political)
sense, conceives the phenomenon of exhibition only as one fragment (not even the
most important, though the most visible), out of many other significant fragments
constitutive for the working process and the production of knowledge. art-e-conomy
thus proposes the possibilities of approaching curatorial discourses and practices
from a critical standpoint, where a strong emphasis is put on the inherent ideological
mechanisms of power between and within the institutions of cultural, financial and
social capital.
Starting from the critical positioning within the global sphere of exhibition making
and art production, art-e-conomy is all about the paradigm shift taking place in - what
has been politically termed as – Central, East and South East Europe, a territory still
gaining much of its daily disturbances from what could be highlighted as suffering
from a ‘non-EU’ syndrome. This status of ‘’non-being-but-still-somehow-belongingto’’
the political matrix of united heterogeneity (that is to be recognized today as the
‘’European Union’’) is actually revealing a double-sense process insisting on political
change, while at the same time being entirely supported by the new economic
paradigm (i.e. the ‘’Global Capitalism’’).
art-e-conomy departs from the fundamental lack (for Central, East and South East
European cultural and political space) of a specific and articulated discourse related
to the intersection between art and economy. This is perceived as a problematic field,
where the (im)possibility to establish an explicit relationship between contemporary
art and economy fosters the necessity to overcome this gap, publicly problematize it,
and react by fostering the articulation of the various practices of artistic intervention.
The fact is that the relationship between art and economy, within this territory, has still
not been analyzed from either an affirmative or critical point of view. By establishing
explicitly this relational discourse, the platform is conceived as a stimulating fertile
ground and a contribution toward common interests for both sectors.
In this sense, economy is a word closely connected to (or, in Marxist terms,
simultaneous with) the idea of production. Economic system is thus understood as
an organizational system based upon decision-making processes leading toward the
production of commodities, their distribution, and exchange. However, what we are
dealing with here is not a single economic system, but actually a conflicting situation
emerging from a fundamental difference between the two economic systems, or
economic philosophies: capitalist, on the one hand, and socialist, on the other. These
two systems, or philosophies, determine the critical line I intend to exploit in order
to analyze and position the post-socialist Eastern European art (and contemporary
curatorial practices related to it) with regard to the logic of the market and the
expansion of global capitalism in contemporary world. If we are to approach these
two systems from a ‘black and white’ perspective, it will be easier to perceive their
fundamental differences just as much as our perception of the global capitalism as
a vital characteristic of our epoch.