Disclaimer: This post deals with contemporary art, mainly focused on western contemporary art from wealthy nations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve been on a 5-year long journey to discover what it looks like to make art outside of the art world or simply not be involved with it at all.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHowever both accelerative projection and decelerative reflection are retrofitted into a world of cognitive templates whose nebulizing function creates a cultural fog of conceptual conflation and practical impotency. It is through this operative fog that some of the more insidious mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism are directly plugged into the cognitive infrastructure under the guise of a world that appears determined to extend the plasticity of imagination and expand frontiers of action. But this is a world in which the financial closure of capitalism is cloned and grafted onto a cognitively maimed economy for accumulating false alternatives in the name of liberation of imagination and action. A suture of different overambitious vocations and driven by the wealth of waste it generates, the resulting beast is a prophetic vision of a tightly connected and controlled society with a single closed alimentary circuit, the human centipede. Those who scheme to infiltrate this world in order to militantly or cunningly liberate it from the inside are locked into the compactly segmented structure of the metameric organism. At once necessary for the growth yet expendable, every insider is a new addition to the iterated sequence of mouths and rectums through which the art world bootstraps itself \u2013 a miracle made possible by a simple but efficacious financial and cognitive algorithm. Dreams of acceleration or deceleration, speculative enthusiasm for the outside or critical self-reflection are revealed to be simple changes of frequency in the rate of the said iteration.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Human Centipede, A View From the Art World\u201d, Reza Negarestani<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n While Reza\u2019s language might be complicated, the description is precisely how I felt being involved in the art world. The many attempts to liberate the art world from its financial, political and wasteful neo-liberal path get eaten and chewed up and turned into financial assets, political \u201cfeelgood\u201d exhibitions and spectacular events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The material conditions on which contemporary art is built involve unpaid labour, mixing of private and public funds for maximal capital extraction, tax-free benefits for the wealthy and a troublesome relationship with immoral individuals such as The Sackler Family<\/a>, Zabludowicz<\/a> and Norway\u2019s finest, the Fredriksen family<\/a>. These problematic relationships have always existed and will continue as long as the centipede still exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lack of environmental considerations<\/a> (endless flights, the importance of certain metropolitan cities, art fairs, grandiose artwork productions, shipping and storage,<\/a> oil money sponsorships etc) makes it hard to take its increased focus on social justice seriously. The majority of the unheard voices are not making art but exist outside of it, working in slave-like conditions to make a living. Their labour results in a fancy display at an art fair or a political cg rendered film displayed on the latest Samsung tv model in a museum. The dependence on slave-like conditions to keep material costs low for the artist to deliver the message of social justice makes the centipede argument even more potent. The artist, curator and museum are responsible for the use of technology and the exploitation in the supply chain, the viewer is also accountable for its continued support of this practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n