art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

Risk is hence a structural characteristic of contemporary society. The scapes of
this society in the age of globalisation can be ethno-, media-, techno-, financial- and
ideoscapes.[8] The Variable Risk Landscape is a phenomenological description and
depiction of the policy of economic investment of capital in the situation in which
IT culture rules. Everything is, ostensibly, spectacularly transparent. It is as if it is
nowhere possible to find something outside the actual system of a mathematically
ordered system of needs.
The departure of the artist into the mountains corresponds to the fluidity in the
share movements on the financial market. In such a financial landscape the possibility
of profit in excess of the expected value in the growth of what is expected derives from
the uncertainty of the risk. This is that kind of cognitive rationality of the system that
Martinis intuitively recognises in the functioning of global capitalism as network.
The transmedia artist in virtual reality and real virtuality of spectacle of the nature
of capital appears as subject of the work and the event (Art&Event Network). He
does not make use of the technical capacities of the new media just for the sake of
their instrumental function of innovation and experiment. The whole of IT culture is
a media event of global capitalism.
The spectacle of nature/being as transcendental condition of global capitalism
marks the condition of the real opportunities of each individual project of investing
within the space-time of the variable risk landscape. Hence Dalibor Martinis from the
outset assumes something ambiguous in the concept of nature. It is a level for the
internal being and substance of the “natural, necessary and eternal”, an unchanging
system of social relationships that like a mystery rule the human world. And yet such
a nature is a social construction and hence an ideological phantasm that is used for
the rejection of alternatives.[9]
The artist justifiably explores this kind of ideological viewpoint of the reconciliation
with the culture of spectacle as a kind of post-modern fatalism without any alternative.
In one interview connected with new projects he had put on, Dalibor Martinis
programmatically put forward his credo as metapolitical artist in the transmedia
world of IT culture: “Belief that art cannot change the world is fatalism”.[10]
The other meaning of nature is shown by the artist’s going up into the mountains.
Nature is the nature of capital as spectacle. It is a culturalised media event, and not
nature-in-itself. The return to nature is possible, but only as some kind of ecological
fundamentalism. This is the fate of the post-modern life styles ruling the landscape
of variable risks.
A sense of religion, spirituality and authentic mystic events have always taken
place as a movement “outside this world”, for example into the mountains of Tibet
or Nepal. This kind of mediation of the mystic in the New Age culture is nothing
but the post-modern lifestyle of global capitalism. Nature as such does not exist.
Martinis acknowledges only the changed and variable historical nature that opens
up the possibilities for an alternative only when the actual nature of the spectacle of
capital is critically deconstructed. Everything else is an illusory flight into nature as a
contemporary desirable lifestyle. But this is just one in a sequence of lifestyles that
express the spiritual crisis of the West. The natural landscape of global capitalism is
the cultural risk of the economy as the only immanent religion of salvation.
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