art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

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Pietroiusti on one side and Takashi Murakami on another. The positions of these last
two can appear unethical – given that one creates a work of art (a watercolor) that is
legally signed, but when placed on sale loses its artistic value, while the other directly
takes his creative work to a lavish multinational corporation like Louis Vuitton.
Yet, at close observation, this first case is not only subversive, but is also a
testament to the recreation of a parallel anti-economic system. Additionally, the
second case should not just be reduced to a marketization of creativity because by
accepting the mercantilogical reinterpretation by the artist, the business must have
had to renounce everything, for example, to the serious aplomb that characterizes
the identity of the brand. On the same level, one can also link the distorted parody of
01.org, the collective that achieved success with the provocative proposal to create
a public square for the Nike sneaker brand, paradoxically quite credible in a world
clenched by strong and often insensitive sponsorship.
Instead many artists choose to follow yet another path, like Claude Closky, with
his wallpaper inspired by Nasdaq values, or Maria Eichhorn who is noted for her
participation in the 2002 Documenta with a true and real lawfully registered society
with bank notes of “wholly deposited capital”). Marianne Heier filmed the delicate
Thai ritual where they burn fake bank notes in honor of the deceased, while Santiago
Sierra creates works of “imposition” that entices economically disadvantaged people
to do practically anything in exchange for money. Carlo Zanni, with his construction
of delicate digital landscapes that then are revealed to be nothing more than a bidimensional
transcription of Ebay auction data, or finally, the Orgacom group that
organized an exhibition in which the public was automatically selected by a badge
distributed at the entrance and separated according to determined categories
(neophyte, artist, gallerist, etc.), which ended up in one’s own self-observation.
In these cases, in which one can add the work on bank images by Neil
Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, or the cold “cathodic” operations of
Fabrice Hybert, maybe one can speak of a sort of “detached reflection”, which
is a position of apparently disenchanted acceptance of existence, where instead
there is a profound disappointment in the disintegration of one of the last
certainties of the post-industrial individual, the unconscious faith in the market.
In conclusion, many artists still seem to rob an intuition to the last Battiato. The
problem in the confusion of roles between an economy, that in its new and “creative”
versions tends to cross borders in artistic forms, and an art that is often subjugated
by the rules of its own (and of others) market, seems to be the reconstruction a path,
though, minimal. The “minimal stratagems”, therefore, consist of the restoration of
a sensorial itinerary, (in)complete to depart from a reflection of conditions given by
the context. Exemplified in this direction is the modus operandi of Michael Rakowitz,
who intervenes with site specific operations that take more than the physical space
into consideration; they occupy the social, legal, urban, cultural space (for example
he has installed a car cover in a parking lot, that occupies public soil in such a way
that it reaches the limits of legality without being openly illegal).
Moving in a similar direction is the artistic research of Michael Blum who retraces
in a video, the history of a typical postmodern product - his jogging sneakers, or
Rainer Ganahl, whose work consists of a reading of Das Kapital by Karl Marx in