art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

of information and knowledge about investment can sometimes take on the form
of a lottery or betting shop.
The case and uncertainty of the risk undermine the rational nature and necessity
of capitalism. The distribution of the profit deriving from Dalibor Martinis’s project
for the users of the virtual community is shown in the exalted gesture as a science
teaching of renunciation. Martinis is in his experiment with monetary transactions
an authentic transmedial artist demonstrating the perversions of social power
strategies.
The spectacle of the nature of capital is not inherently good or bad. IT culture is
neither good nor bad. It functions as a pictorial revolution of social relationships in the
world. Martinis has spectacularly deconstructed the essence of the global economy
as unconscious historical risk of investing in nothing in order to gain everything.
Contemporary art does not live off the dirty money of global capital, nor is it its vassal.
Money is just a medium for crossing the border between two apparently detached
spheres, which shows the state of social awareness better than any fraudulent ethic
of Christian charity. The transmedial artist in the variable risk landscape is a member
of the ultimate “at-risk group” in this vicious circle of commodity, money and capital.
His nature is outside the logic of spectacle.
He is the natural provocateur of the social power system. The pleasure in this
artistic spectacle of the absolute lack of purpose of the very game with the economy
of global power of the world puts him on the level of Beuys’ law, equating not just art
and capital, but also artist and capitalist. If capital as such can at all be an artistic
work or event, why then cannot Dalibor Martinis be a transmedial capitalist who
creates and demolishes his virtual artistic work/event, revelling in the joyful shock
of life’s losers?
1 Manuel Castells, Uspon umreženog društva ( A Rise of Network Society), Golden Marketing,
Zagreb, 2000.
2 Steven Best/Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural
Studies at the Third Millenium, The Guildford Press, New York-London, 2001.
3 Guy Debord, Društvo spektakla (The Society of Spectacle), Arkzin, Zagreb, 1999.
4 Giorgio Agamben, Die kommenden Gemeinschaft, Merve, Berlin, 2003.
5 Fredric Jameson, Singular Modernity, Verso, London-New York, 2002.
6 Dieter Mersch, Ereignis und Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen,
Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2002., Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation, Edition
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2003., Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, Edition
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2004.
7 Ulrich Beck, Macht und Gegenmacht in globalen Zeitalter: Neue Weltpolitische Ökonomie,
Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2002.
8 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, University of
Minnesotta Press, Minneapolis, 1996.
9 Bruno Latour, “Za politiku prirode“ (For the Politics of Nature), Journal, Tvrđa, 1-2/2004.
10 Novi list, “Mediteran“, January 16, 2005.
11 Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Revision nacxh zehn Jahren, C.H. Beck, München,
2002., 2nd ed., Pierre Bourdieu/Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and
Culture, SAGE, London-New York, 1990.
12 Platform I., Documenta XI: Democracy, Unrealized, Begleitheit, Kassel/Berlin, 2001.
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