Max Haiven's Blog, page 15
October 22, 2018
Counterspeculation: Podcast, audio-tour and blog
October 10, 2018
Art after Money (Open Democracy)
This essay was originally published on Open Democracy on 10 October 2018.
Art after money
Max Haiven
Banksy’s prank on the art market rhymes with our common struggle against financialization’s shredding of society.
Banksy’s prank on the art market rhymes with our common struggle against financialization’s shredding of society.
Banksy’s latest art prank, in which one of his iconic works shredded itself after being won at auction, has enthused many of us who have been following the depravities of the art world for some time. The artist’s antagonism towards the elites who buy and sell contemporary art is well known, and this stunt comes almost a year after the world record was set for the auction sale of Salvador Mundi, allegedly by Leonardo Da Vinci, for a jaw-dropping $450,312,500 – sold by a notorious Russian oligarch to a member of the Saudi Royal Family.
At a time when spoiled billionaires seem to get anything they want, Banksy’s act of vengeance can appear deeply satisfying, but there is more going on here than a simple loathing of the rich and powerful. In my recent book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization I argue that the fate of art is a bellwether for broader trends in society, trends that affect not only artists but practically everyone else.
The primary trend is financialization. Usually this term is taken to refer to the increased power and influence of the financial sector: big banks, hedge funds and other firms in The City or on Wall Street. Even before these institutions started using algorithms and AI to automate the trading of assets (which include things like the world’s food supply) this industry had already created havoc in the global economy by transforming it into a kind of casino.
But the notion of financialization also speaks to the way in which nearly everything in our society is being transformed into a means for someone to make profit, or reformatted as if they were corporate products. Even public services like education, health-care and anti-poverty initiatives are managed and spoken of as if they are ‘investments.’ Young people are increasingly taught to see themselves not as the next generation of citizens but as private speculators improving their human capital to compete on the job market. Housing has increasingly come to be seen as a private means of securing wealth for tomorrow and hedging against future economic uncertainty in a world where few forms of collective insurance (such as state-backed programs for social welfare) remain.
In the financialization of art, then, we see a grim reflection of wider trends. It’s not simply that art has become the plaything of a financially-engorged global elite. After all, even in the Italian renaissance, the Dutch Golden Age or 19th century Paris, rich patrons and benefactors have always shaped art markets. Today, however, the influence of fast money on art (and everything else) is more profound and penetrating.
Over the past 20 years, a whole array of intermediaries have emerged to help transform art into a purely financial asset. These include art investment funds that allow wealthy people to buy art for speculative future returns; the mushrooming of secretive and hyper-secured Freeport facilities in Switzerland, Singapore and elsewhere where investors can stash their masterpieces in climate-controlled vaults, the better to buy and sell their rights to ownership or hide these assets from taxation; and a wide range of institutions (like the world’s leading insurance brokers) and startups who jockey to provide services to those who leverage art as a special asset class as part of a carefully counterbalanced portfolio of mega-wealth.
The accelerating speculation on the financial value of art has led to a rise in demand for new saleable works, since many of the old classics have already been snatched up. This has led to all manner of aesthetic pathologies and the rise of whole new genres of art like the notorious “zombie formalism” of 2014 – a term introduced by art critic Walter Robinson to describe the inoffensive but technically proficient work of a set of very young American artists (all graduates of extremely expensive art schools) who rocketed to market success as speculative bonbons of the plutocrats.
As a staunch anti-capitalist and someone who is generally more interested in protest banners than artistic canvases, I couldn’t care less about the fate of ‘great art’ under financialization. What’s more important are two things that this process is teaching us about the societies in which we live.
First, art offers us an excellent example of the ways in which almost any social institution can be financialized, even something as obscure, diverse and just plain weird as art. Historically art markets have been notoriously opaque and cliqueish, and the trends and currents of artistic fashion and innovation are, by their very nature, delightfully unpredictable, fickle and arcane. A century after artists like Duchamp’s Fountain – where a everyday urinal was transmuted into ‘art’ by the magic of the artist’s signature – art is everywhere and nowhere, taking the form not only of paintings and sculpture but performance, text, concept and even participatory activities. That our financialized economic system can so thoroughly conscript and subsume art into its operations should give us pause for thought.
In this context everything of potential future value is transformed into an asset to be leveraged, and one in which we are each, no matter how humble our means, tasked with becoming a miniature financier. We have learned to see our education, housing, skills and even personal relationships as investments to be put into play, to see all aspects of our life as a terrain of lonely competition. Take, for example, the rhetoric that surrounds visual art classes for children: these are typically presented as an ‘investment’ in the skills, capacities and cognitive development of the child as a future worker or economic agent.
Financialization has remade society in its image, and in this moment, financialized art (regardless of what is or is not on the canvas) presents us with a kind of collective self-portrait. No wonder we delight in its being shredded. As the radical philosopher Walter Benjamin warned almost a century ago in his prophetic work on art’s relationship to capitalism and fascism, “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
Secondly, almost 20 years ago the noted British cultural theorist Angela McRobbie observed that, in post-industrial societies, artists were increasingly being held up as the “pioneers of the new economy” – new model workers for a neoliberal age of freelance, temporary, part-time, episodic careerism in which people must compete for gigs by leveraging their own passions, connections, determination and personal portfolios. In the intervening years Richard Florida’s notion of the “creative class” has dramatically influenced policy-makers and urban planners around the world who imagined that attracting and retaining artists, designers and other ‘creative’ workers would raise the fortunes of struggling economies and communities.
‘Creative destruction’ and ‘disruptive innovation’ became keywords for the rapaciousness of financialization as it tore apart whole industries in search of short-term profit. While in 1968 the slogan “all power to the imagination” was a radical threat to capitalism, by the mid-2000s it was a corporate rallying-cry, with tech firms leading the way in redesigning managerialism around the excitement and elicitation of their employees’ creativity.
Ultimately, financialization names a moment when our imaginations have been turned against us. We are increasingly exhorted to orient our creative powers towards the tasks of economic survival – juggling debt, precarity and anxiety while trying to leverage anything we can to stay afloat or get ahead. What is missing is the broader, radical imagination: the possibility of questioning and reformulating our societies and economies altogether. While individualized, quarantined, competitive creativity is valorized everywhere, collective or social creativity – the creativity that would allow us to transform our lived reality together – is increasingly foreclosed.
Banksy’s self-annihilating work reflects this condition. Accusations that it was self-serving because it potentially increased the future sale price of the work seem to me to be in bad faith: first, Banksy is already rich and has had many opportunities to get richer if he wants to. Second, the piece had already been sold for the hammer price: even if Banksy were the seller (which is unclear) he would (except in certain jurisdictions) not see any profits from the future resale of the work. But that doesn’t change the deeper fact that the hyper-financialized art market has refined its methods for generating speculative value out of anything, even acts of defiance.
To my mind, we can read this intervention in several ways. On the one hand, it can be seen as emblematic of a certain kind of nihilistic self-loathing: the artist destroying their own work as a pyrrhic but ultimately harmless gesture of cynical defiance. There but for the grace of god go any of us. On the other, it can be seen as an invitation to ask much deeper and more profound questions: if the financialized economy that is so sickeningly reflected in the art market depends on putting our creativity to work, then what if we were to withdraw those services? How can we strike, and strike back, against a financialized order where even our defiance can become an object of speculation? To what other ends could our imagination, individually and collectively, be put?
The post Art after Money (Open Democracy) appeared first on Max Haiven.
October 4, 2018
October launch events for Art after Money
September 5, 2018
“Colonial Debts, Imperial Insolvencies, Extractive Nostalgias” focus section of Discover Society
September 4, 2018
Political Economy at Art School
This article was originally published in Canadian Art in September of 2018.
Political Economy at Art School
Max Haiven
Why we can’t—and shouldn’t—disentangle art from money
Zachary Gough, Bourdieux: A Social Currency, 2014.It’s a comforting myth that art and money ought to have nothing in common.
The reality, however, is that ever since there’s been such a thing as “Art”—something distinct from craft, from ornament, from religious iconography—money has been part of the picture. This not-altogether-new observation was one to which my students and I kept returning when I taught a course on art and money at the storied Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). The coursework and research offered a critical examination of the motivations and challenges facing contemporary artists who work with various forms of currency and financial instruments (coins, bills, banknotes, debt, derivatives contracts) as media for creative and critical expression and intervention.
Teaching political economy at NSCAD felt like an important venture for a few reasons. For one, as is by now well-known, the school was going through a rough patch at the time. I was part of the grassroots efforts, led by students, faculty and staff, to fend off a miserly provincial government—under the NDP, it should be noted—that appeared eager to either merge the institution with another, or to close it entirely. In either case, the government saw fit to impose an austerity agenda on the beleaguered but legendary art school. In this context, the mythologies that surround the relationship between art and money infantilize and marginalize artists and arts professionals as hopeless, penniless romantics incapable of minding their purses, while at the same time normalizing neoliberal austerity as stern, rational, necessary paternalism. Ultimately, these two myths mutually reinforce each other: “Art” is art precisely because it is not money; money is money precisely because it is not art.
This leads to the second, perhaps more significant reason it felt so important to teach political economy at an art school, and to expand this research into writing a book about art and money: the times of financial and economic crisis in which we live. While economists assure us that the financial crisis of 2008 is over, that reality is only true for the rich: inequality keeps growing and austerity measures still rule the day. Unfortunately, most people greet this condition with an air of inevitability, as if godlike “markets” and their violent behaviour toward society, especially the poor and precarious, were natural or necessary. In fact, putting faith in neoliberal economics is a choice our society is making—a choice that has a lot to do with the limits on our collective imaginations of what else might be possible.
Instead of asking these questions, however, a whole range of commentators—from remote internet chat rooms to the editorials of establishment media—seek to blame the ongoing crisis on the manipulation of the financial realm or the money supply by nefarious forces that replace real wealth with imaginary proxies. But one of the questions we, as faculty and student researchers, asked was: when has money not been, at least in part, imaginary? It’s not just fiat currencies (tokens like coins or bills authorized for use by the state) that are, after all, useless—gold and silver are too. Money has always been a kind of public conspiracy or a collective hallucination, one that too often reproduces the interests and wealth of the ruling class. The bigger, juicier question is how the powerful are able to manipulate the collective imagination, and how the radical imagination can fight back.
This is the third reason I am so keen to teach and write about these themes: if money has always been, to some extent, a matter of shared belief, of the coordinated imagination of society at large, then maybe artists have a lot more to offer to questions of economics than we ever imagined.
I don’t mean this in the sense of Richard Florida’s notions of the “creative class” and the rise of “creative cities,” which (in spite of his stated intentions) seem to have largely facilitated the financialization of the urban fabric, where artists have been used as the so-called shock troops of gentrification. Indeed, it was already more than 15 years ago that theorist Angela McRobbie warned us that artists were being held up as “pioneers of the new economy”: savvy risk-takers eager to leverage social and cultural capital to pursue competitive independent careers in the “brave new world of work.” In the (successful) fight to save NSCAD from losing its autonomy as a school and an institution, we ended up mobilizing a lot of this rhetoric because we felt it might be the only thing the government, and its corporate allies, would listen to. What we jeopardized was the increasingly heretical truth that there ought to be things in our society—ideas, debates, human experiences—not relentlessly subjugated to the grim calculus of an omnipotent market.
The high umbrage often taken at the “financialization” of art may be slightly misplaced. The idea that art should be immune from money’s influence is a relatively recent one, and one that, ironically enough, is precisely what guarantees art’s value, as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued almost half a century ago. Art becomes “Art” (and not kitsch or craft) because it is said to stand outside the market—but this is precisely what gives it (potentially) such tremendous economic, market value.
“Art” and money have been, and are, forever entangled, and protestation of this entanglement just makes the embrace tighter. That said, what can’t be denied is the global rise of all sorts of institutions now aimed at transforming artworks into financial assets: new algorithmic indexes that capture and predict the price of contemporary art; art investment funds that allow speculators to pool their capital to buy contemporary works purely to profit from future resale; and hyper-securitized “freeport” luxury warehouses (I recently visited one in Singapore) where these and other investors store their works unseen, beyond any human gaze, potentially for decades or even centuries at a time.
Because we persist in imagining that art stands outside of capitalism, we have faith that it can be critiqued in unique ways. But what if the critical, radical potential of art comes precisely from its entanglement with capitalism? My gambit is that, if we pay close attention to the strategies radical artists use when dealing with money-as-media in this age of financialization, we can learn something important about how the rest of us (non-artists) struggle within, against and beyond a system of financialized global capitalism that otherwise feels like it is saturating and destroying everything in this world.
The real risk in persisting with the romantic myth of art’s fatal allergy to money is that it fetishizes art as a sacred realm profaned by capitalism. In doing so, we end up distracted from the way capitalism is destroying and sapping creativity and imagination from all sorts of other spheres of life, notably the bedrock of the economy itself: the methods by which we cooperate on a finite and troubled planet. Turning artistic impulse, and craft, toward radical economic questions in this sense is long overdue.
The post Political Economy at Art School appeared first on Max Haiven.
August 20, 2018
Call for hosts: talks and workshops (2018/2019) – Art after Money, Money after Art
June 25, 2018
Counterspeculations blog series on the financial imagination
June 12, 2018
RiVAL July 2018 newsletter
May 24, 2018
“Are your children old enough to learn about May ’68?’: Recalling the radical event, refracting utopia and commoning memory” (article, chapter, interview)
May 12, 2018
Colonial Debts Extractive Nostalgias Imperial Insolvencies – Call for Interventions
