Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy

I am expanding on a notion developed by Hongjohn Lin in his curatorial statement for the Taipei Biennial 2010. Hongjohn Lin, “Curatorial Statement,” in 10TB Taipei Biennial Guidebook (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2010), 10–11.

This has been described as a global and ongoing process of expropriation since the 1970s. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). As for the resulting distribution of wealth, a study by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) found that in the year 2000, the richest 1 percent of adults alone owned 40 percent of global assets. The bottom half of the world's adult population owned 1 percent of global wealth. See →.

For just one example of oligarch involvement, see →. While such biennials span from Moscow to Dubai to Shanghai and many of the so-called transitional countries, we shouldn’t consider post-democracy to be a non-Western phenomenon. The Schengen area is a brilliant example of post-democratic rule, with a whole host of political institutions not legitimized by popular vote and a substantial section of the population excluded from citizenship (not to mention the Old World’s growing fondness for democratically-elected fascists). The current exhibition “The Potosí-Principle,” organized by Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer, highlights the connection between oligarchy and image production from another historically relevant perspective.

I am drawing on a field of meaning developed by Ekaterina Degot, Cosmin Costinas, and David Riff for their 1st Ural Industrial Biennial, 2010.

Arendt may have been wrong on the matter of taste. Taste is not necessarily a matter of the common, as she argued, following Kant. In this context, it is a matter of manufacturing consensus, engineering reputation, and other delicate machinations, which—whoops—metamorphose into art-historical bibliographies. Let’s face it: the politics of taste are not about the collective, but about the collector. Not about the common but about the patron. Not about sharing but about sponsoring.

There are of course many laudable and great exceptions, and I admit that I myself may bow my head in shame, too.

As is also argued in the reader Institutional Critique, eds. Alex Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). See also the collected issues of the online journal transform: →.

Recently on show at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo was “Guggenheim Visibility Study Group,” a very interesting project by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas that unpacked the tensions between local (and partly indigenist) art scenes and the Guggenheim franchise system, with the Guggenheim effect analyzed in detail in a case study. See →. Also see Joseba Zulaika, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa: Museums, Architecture, and City Renewal (Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, 2003). Another case study: Beat Weber, Therese Kaufmann, “The Foundation, the State Secretary and the Bank – A Journey into the Cultural Policy of a Private Institution,” →. See also Martha Rosler, “Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art ‘Survive’?” e-flux journal, issue 12, →, and Tirdad Zolghadr, “11th Istanbul Biennial,” →.

This is evident from this text's placement on e-flux as an advertisement supplement. The situation is furthermore complicated by the fact that these ads may well flaunt my own shows. At the risk of repeating myself, I would like to emphasize that I do not consider innocence a political position, but a moral one, and thus politically irrelevant. An interesting comment on this situation can be found in Luis Camnitzer, “The Corruption in the Arts / the Art of Corruption,” published in the context of The Marco Polo Syndrome, a symposium at the House of World Cultures in April, 1995. See →.