Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1976), 121.
Interestingly, the moral justification of this neoliberal cult coincides with the phenomenon of the artist as superstar, which actually commences with the so-called third phase of contemporary art—art since the mid-1980s—and should be seen as symptomatic of an equivalent transformation in society. As Olav Velthuis remarks in his insightful sociological analysis of the art market, 1980 was the first year that the highest price paid for a work of art was for a work by a living artist, $1 million for the painting Three Flags by Jasper Johns. What is more significant, however, than the winner-take-all economic model that began to inform the art market, is the so-called superstar circuit that emerged in the New York art world of the 1980s. According to Velthuis, Julian Schnabel is the representative case of an artist whose work saw a rapid rise of price level (and equally fast decline), and is characteristic of the new market’s mentality and “aggressive superstar pricing strategy.” (In a period of less than seven years, Schnabel prices soared from $3,000 to $300,000, improving the “symbolic” and financial position of the artist, his dealers, and his collectors.) Warranted or not, this mixture of show business and stock-market mentality linked to prospective financial success has, since then, infiltrated the art world and produced a Darwinian network of success or burn-out. Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meaning of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005), 145.
Peter Osborne, “Imaginary Radicalisms: Notes on the Libertarianism of Contemporary Art,” in Verksted 8 (2006): 15.
Ibid., 18.
Stewart Martin, “Critique of Relational Aesthetics,” in Verksted 8 (2006): 113.
Ibid., 106.
Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 195.
“The sensible rises toward the divine and enters art only at the state of ideality, of the abstract sensible. Art thus ‘lies nearer to the spirit and its thinking than purely external spiritless nature does.’ The matter it exerts itself on is ‘a spiritualized sensible appearance or a sensible appearance of the spiritual.’ ” Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 205.
Obviously, the conflict between galleries and action houses as presented here is a theoretical example. The reality is often simpler: Because auction houses not only often present the appearance of a free market, but also a powerful system of interdependencies between a gallery, an auction house, and a private or corporate collection, they control—and monopolize—prices and values.
As Norbert Trenkle explains, “credit and speculation capital are fictitious because they only apparently serve as capital. They yield high interest rates and speculative gains for investors in the relative absence of real valorization, which always presupposes that abstract labor is spent on the production of commodities and services and that a proportion of it is siphoned off as surplus value.” See →.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Cognitarian Subjectivation,” in Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 135.
Ibid., 138.
See Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie: Les sources Byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1996).
Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2011), xii. Doxa in Greek means both Glory and “common belief” or “popular opinion.”
I freely use the term eikonomia in reference to theoretical debates during Byzantine iconoclasm. See Emanuel Alloa, “Bildökonomie. Von den theologischen Wurzeln eines streitbaren Begriffs,” in Image 2 (2005): 13–24.
Maurizio Lazzarato, Videophilosophie. Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus (Berlin: B-Books, 2002).