art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

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academicism for the feverous research of approval and economic outcome, dominated
by the coercive impulse towards the production of lugubrious calembours for annoyed
and distracted spectators, a little like the societal games at the court of Versailles in
the months that preceded the Revolution. Chic necrophilia, like in the advertisement
pages of expensive stylists. Who copied from whom? Everyone and no one, there are
two sides of the same world. However much I regard it, I do not have any nostalgia
for the past, I do not have good times to recall. But I ask myself if this obsessive
bulimia would have been inevitable, and if there are still artists that suffer in view of
their space occupied by people that have no desire or time to understand and that
need to be pleased at all costs. But what on earth for?
According to the common sense, art is Dionysian realm, the economy is Apollonian:
instinct and intuition in contrast to rationality, to cold shrewdness. On the basis of
recent experiences, it would seem possible to maintain just the opposite: it is the
irruption of the economy in the artistic realm that has incited this Dionysian furor.
It is not by chance that one of the most illuminated studies on the dynamics of the
stock market appeared in the last years entitled Irrational Euphoria (R. Schiller, Il
Mulino, 2000). Before the economic explosion of the Eighties, the art system gave
birth to a specific order followed by a generational wave, each one distinguished
by its own labeling, by its own canon and by its own aesthetic common sentiment.
Today the system is in a state of permanent fever, of orgiastic exaltation in which
everything that is, is constantly surpassed by the promise of everything that will be.
We don’t bother to look at the works of a currently exhibiting artist; instead we are
more worried about knowing what exhibition will be next. Of course the reciprocal
contamination between art and the economy is much more complex than we can
suggest in these simple considerations on the economization of art, that which
corresponds to a true and real culturization of the economy. The Vuitton-Murakami
bags (which are rightly exhibited in museums) are not the epi-phenomenon, summed
up are not unlike many analogue examples of the past.
The true manifestation of the new state of things is found in the Lancia Musa publicity
spot “when I drive, I am”: it is a car that aspires (truthfully it is a little pathetic, but
this isn’t the point) to become an affirmation of principle, the centre of an aesthetic
system (it is enough to visit the institutional website of the Lancia Musa to realize
how much this aspiration is explicit and intentional, and at the same time extremely
vain). All products are by now immaterial, they exist in the number of bearers who are
more or less credible and efficient, of an identified worth that leaves their specific
characteristics out of consideration, and on which businesses are no longer worried
about making binding assertions. The product is a fetish to exorcize the fear of non
existence; therefore it is, in every respect, a cultural object.
What are they doing, then, the artists in a historic situation such as this? Certainly
they look to this growing profound penetration of the artistic and economic sectors,
and in their comparisons, they assume the entire range of possible attitudes, from
total assimilation to open mockery. They put their participation in exhibitions on sale,
they ridicule the commission, they aspire to create an alternative exchange system,
but without a lot of commitment and with an almost amateur behavior: they create
for the duration of an exhibition, in the space of an idea, but often without final