s Modern Finance Ruining Modern Art? (Part 1): Mark C. Taylor

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-30/is-modern-finance-ruining-modern-art-part-1-commentary-by-mark-taylor.html


Illustration by Jordy van den Nieuwendijk

Art and money have always been inseparable. As Andy Warhol declared almost four decades ago, “Business art is the step that comes after Art.” During the past several decades, however, this relationship has been transformed by the appearance of a new form of capitalism: finance capitalism.

In previous forms of capitalism -- agricultural, industrial and consumer -- people made money by buying and selling labor and material goods; in finance capitalism, by contrast, wealth is created by circulating signs backed by nothing other than other signs. When investment becomes more speculative, the rate of circulation accelerates and the floating signifiers, which now constitute wealth, proliferate.

The structure and development of financial markets and the art market mirror each other. As art becomes a progressively abstract play of non-referential signs, so increasingly abstract financial instruments become an autonomous sphere of circulation whose end is nothing other than itself. When the overall economy moves from industrial and consumer capitalism to finance capitalism, art undergoes parallel changes. There are three stages in this process: the commodification of art, the corporatization of art, and the financialization of art.

Virtual Versus Real

At the end of these interrelated trajectories, the real seems to have become virtual and the virtual appears to be real. But just when the circuit seems to be complete, the system implodes and the real returns.

[frazzled]

1. Boy, does this guy not understand art

First of all, art hasn't been "modern" since the 1970s at the latest. And contemporary art since that time has played very little with "a progressively abstract play of non-referential signs." The rise of abstract financial instruments, by this analysis, should have reached its height in the 1950s, when nonreferential abstract expressionism was at its height.

To equate the neo-Pop of Koons and Murakami (who, by the way, are decidedly not abstract or non-referential) with the whole of contemporary art is myopic at best. The craziness of the art market does indeed in ways mirror the craziness of the financial markets. But investors have been melded with art as a symbol of wealth since the Renaissance. Artists like a Hans Haacke or a Gordon Matta-Clark, etc. have been trying to make art that defied commodification since the beginning of the postmodern era. Even it gets recuperated into the capitalist system once discovered and venerated (rightly). It doesn't make the art any less great.

[snagglepuss]

2. to read later