art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

unexpected contexts, or Norma Jeane (an artist who utilizes the proper name of
Marilyn Monroe as a pseudonym), who realized a series of jewels, the ecstatic market
of luxury that hides an obscure threat on the inside (in reality they are containers of
sulphuric acid). Traveling in similar direction is the price subversion operations by
Marco Vaglieri (who has already worked on the statute of the “artist”), or the work
of Christoph Büchel, who, in order to indirectly respond to the incessant question
of producing “new works”, does not materially realize anything, but has asked the
institution who hosts him to allocate a “virtual capital” that will be used only in the
moment in which the artist will have a “real idea”.
A special mention is bestowed upon the works of Mark Lombardi, an American
artist who recently passed in 2000, obsessed with the theme of conspiracy, but to
such a degree that he furnished accurate abstract maps that hide the occult ties
between political and economic power under the guise of an artistic “conceptual”
work (in a certain sense, they clearly anticipate that which director Michael Moore
brought to light in his documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11).
And lastly, the apocalyptic and genuinely utopian operations of Cai Guo-Qiang
who exploded bank notes in a fireworks display, that closely recalls the unknown
operations of the mysterious collective, K Foundation, who in 1993, as it may seem,
created (and filmed) the crazy undertaking of “burning a million sterling” – working
on the limits of artistic creation, of anarchy, of total and nonsensical subversion, on
which weighs the promise of the pair to “not speak about it for the following twenty
three years” (we must therefore wait until 2016 to understand it all).
Returning to the relationship between art and the economy, we can therefore
conclude, stating that rather than insisting on the differences that separate the two
circles, it is more advantageous to observe them as a singularly considered sphere
that contains within it the elements that differentiate them from each other (the
non-economic criteria in the economy, the mercantile elements in art…). As such,
on one side, occurs an acknowledgement that more advanced economic thought
has courageously put the same disciplinary reference points into discussion (and
this is one of the factors that motivates the presence of an economist dressed in the
clothes of a co-curator of an art exhibition); on the other side, the specific merit of
art and the contemporary artist does not reside in the ability to create an obstacle
for themselves, tailoring aesthetically reassured responses, but certainly useless
– in as much as their capability to articulate the questions that these contradictions
pose into memorable symbols.
These texts were first published in Italian, on the occasion of the exhibition Interessi Zero!
Strategie artistiche per un’economia in crisi, curated by Pier Luigi Sacco and Marco Senaldi, March
12th – May 29th, 2005, Galleria Civica di arte Contemporanea di Trento, in collaboration with the
Faculty of Economics of the University of Trento and The Order of Commercialist Doctors of the
Province of Trento, www.workartonline.net
219