CrInvestorEscape
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[edit] Invest or escape?
Making a living in the state art industry is a dirty business. The merge of culture and economy1 has made the transformation of 'participation', 'consultation', and other forms of affective labour into capital a very efficient process.
Keeping track of the value transfers, the horsetrading of fashions, people, groups, affiliations and branding is draining and blurring. Adopting a 'critical' position in relation to this market - being able to observe its transactions, demands a sufficient investment in it and co-option by it to be able to judge.
Withdrawal is a tried and tested strategy, refusal to engage with anything associated with this economy; but the generalised problem - the industrialisation of affective labour, is not so easy to escape - even if unfamiliarity with different markets makes it easier to ignore.
If the choice is simply in which industry to 'reproduce my own alienation',2 it is not a choice - the transfer of knowledge as value spans cultural context too effectively - the galleries and exhibition halls of culture and economy are built on the foundations of art and life. The Tate modern brings art to the factory, the Baltic in Newcastle brings art to the mill, Tate Liverpool to the docks - the favorite venues of art-as-life radicalism, perfectly transformed into knowledge factories.
So my compromise of choice for today involves operating in an environment where familiarity and experience makes it easier to observe these transformations of value - and refusing to be 'critical' in the sense of trying to move 'outside' these transactions - but rather trying to become dispassionately aware of the action of the market on my own desires and actions - and on those of my fellow traders.
Despite this awareness, and above the noise of this humming, flickering network
- f capital exchange, it is still sometimes possible to communicate and even to
represent uncompromised, genuine aspirations and ideas to other traders in
- ther markets. Sometimes the reflex to trade - to transform and expand value
is accompanied by one of these communications, and the aspiration and idea develops in the periphery of an exchange, where its exchange value doesn't undermine its use value or meaning. These moments are the reason to be involved, to trade and invest.
1 Anthony Davies, The Surge to Merge Culture With Economy, Copenhagen Free University: http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/AD01.html
2 Stewart Home, Art is like Cancer, mute 28. (www.metamute.com)
- - SaulAlbert September 19, 2004
