Writing - Economy of Art & Images

There has been a great deal of speculation about how the Covid-19 Pandemic will affect art and the art world. This question is, of course, somewhat insignificant as communities around the world continue to face a dire health crisis that leaves more people dead each day. Many businesses remain closed to help fight the spread of the disease while consumer behavior has been fundamentally altered in ways that may have long-lasting effects that will take years for businesses to adjust to. As a result, the economy remains deeply depressed, unemployment remains high, and many people struggle to meet financial obligations.

Architects have been consistently intrigued by the possibility of designing spaces to house artwork.  This is in large part because of the coevolution of art and architecture and, in particular, the overlap between the two fields during the Renaissance.  The invention of perspective drawing propelled innovation by artists and architects.  As this occurred, new architectural typologies were solidified – the urban palazzo and rural villa – that created new space for artworks to be created.  In particular, the vast white plaster walls of these structures created an opportunity for frescos while the halls and large rooms created space for new and ancient sculptures to be displayed.  As industries and trade evolved, oil paint and linen canvas began to present a viable options for the creation of pictures.  The result was a new capacity to move artworks from one location to another. In realizing this liberation of the fresco from the wall and coupled with the growing interest in the ancient world in collecting in general, the broader question of where to display and store artwork came to the fore.  Collectors created curiosity cabinets for small treasures, halls devoted to hanging artworks, and private galleries.  The latter evolved amidst royal patronage in countries throughout Europe.  These galleries were ultimately made public after the abolition or reorganization of the monarchy and its role in governing and society more broadly.  As this occurred, a wide range of royal and other elite individuals continued to collect artwork at an increasing rate.  This led to the establishment of a range of schools that evolved from the ateliers of artists and that were dedicated to cultivating artistic talent.  It also led to a more formalized market for art that now included galleries and art dealers as an intermediary between artist and collector.

It is vital to understand what the term “art” refers to in the world and for the people who produce and consume it.  This notion holds for many such terms that divide the horizon of our existence into different categories for which we have varying degrees of interest and concern.  It is particularly true for “art” because of the legacy of works that continue to draw interest, the joy that it results in, and the extent to which “art” stands out from the rest of the world.  Engaging in such a pursuit allows us to understand the physical material configurations that are associated with art, the relationship between those configurations and the broader world, and the network of judgment that arises in close proximity to evaluate, profit from, and take joy in the events that are unfolding around something called “art.”  It opens the possibility of tracking how this process has occurred at different points in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the term and how it is situated. In what follows, I will explore how the term “art” is situated, performs, and affects rather than what it means.  This is a result of little interest in challenging the sprawling set of experiences and objects, art histories and aesthetic systems that have arisen through attempts to do so.  I take the diffuse field of art production and consumption coupled with the myriad opinions and stances towards it as a given that summarizes the immense and varied capacity to create heightened experiences filled with information as a field of potential for future innovation, action, and progression.  This field cannot be said to have a sensible meaning when taken in its entirety.  It is defined by overlapping and conflicting energy and materiality.  These dynamic relationships trace how “art” is situated in the world and for the receiver through local instances where art is given meaning.  It is these specific moments of situatedness that I am interested in exploring at both the material level and the descriptive level of discourse.  Doing so will allow us to understand not only how art is situated in an everyday encounter, but how art is situated at the level of language.  It is such language that creates a prejudice or frame that limits how – and with what level of accuracy – we describe phenomena and ultimately what new actions and capacities result.

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This essay investigates how art, architecture, and design might be situated in the world in order to restore a functional and communal relationship – and by extension economy – to art, architecture, and design.  In order to do so, I begin by characterizing an impediment to such situatedness of art, architecture, and design as resulting from an increasingly divided world.  This divided world is characterized by new modes of representation, varieties of actors, and entities being representation.  From this follows a discussion of how “representation” is defined as well as the benefits and hazards of relying on a single system versus multiple systems of representation caste by different spheres of influence.  In characterizing representation, I discuss the exchange between presentation and re-presentation, production and re-production, base and superstructure as defining different levels of experience.  I suggest that art, architecture, and design no longer occupy a fixed level or relation to these terms, but offer a range of levels that different groups of people can relate to and use to define themselves by.  This process of identification is an alternative to identification based on class.  In occupying multiple levels, art, architecture, and design are created through a process of elevation that allows them to make contact with and ultimately define how each manifestation will operate on different levels.  I discuss how elevation to a higher level occurs for each by un-packing how presentation and re-presentation, production and re-production operate.  Although the potential exists to address multiple levels with the same work, it is often the case that works of art, architecture, and design are oriented based on economically and socially defined class structures.  In this sense, the potential for these works to support direct identification is limited to begin with by class structures that limit information and access in order to make the work appear to not support such a potential.  This tendency is broken when men and women create new value and enter the intimate world of art as artists, critics, or new collectors – transcending the class and space from which they came as a result.  The highest end work is often hidden within the studio, gallery, or private enclosure.  In this context, I call for this high-end work to be resituated in the city and in direct confrontation with other work derived from other spheres of influence.  Different spheres would come into contact with each other.  The co-presence of spheres would challenge rigid hierarchies of culture and offer room to find comfort with different levels of culture as embodied in art, architecture, and design.  As a result, the relationship between levels of relation to representation and presentation, production and reproduction becomes more important than how any one level appears. The possibility of operating simultaneously in different spheres – adding or subtracting from one or another in the process – opens the possibility of a complex accounting procedure and exchange system.  In so doing, the makers of art, architecture, and design might work together in order to create a communal space and framework of value that currently does not exist.

The Dis-Enclosure of Art investigates the moment when an object is encountered by a person and how and why this person might consider what they encounter to be “art.”  This question is asked within the context of an attempt to interrogate the advantages and disadvantages of the spatial and disciplinary boundaries that enclose art.  The purpose of this work is not only to understand why some things are considered art while others are not, but to understand how this encounter with art has evolved over history.  Moreover, it is to build on this understanding of the historical variations in how the concept of art as well as the art object equates with the world and is constructed through chains of interactions and relations in order to see how the various components affect the world, art, and society in different manners.  Over the course of Dis-Enclosure, I offer an understanding of how art is differentiated and creates difference – often with a profound affect on how people live.  In doing so, we might understand a broader trend of how art operates and how people operate art towards one end or another.  The purpose of understanding an evolutionary trend of art is not so much to provide grounds on which predictions for the future or criticism of the current field of production might rest.  Instead, this search is undertaken in order to attain a better sense of how different modes and periods of art making are related to each other.  Through comparing motivations and strategies for dealing with the situation in which an artist and art operates, it is possible to discover a deeper level of meaning.  By uncovering a frame for such activities of the artist, art, and historical method of understanding it that stretch beyond any period, it is possible to make sense of actions and entities that appear to lack meaning or context.  Through using a frame capable of framing both the world and art, it is possible to understand how art relates to the world in a similar manner over time, across space, and between discourses.  Such a frame would be a balanced equation describing the economy of art on both quantitative and qualitative terms.  The concept of “dis-enclosure” as developed by Jean-Luc Nancy is a closely related frame.  The Dis-Enclosure of Art extends Nancy’s work beyond the realm of Christianity and into the realm of art.  It traces how the forces that led to and resulted from what Nancy calls “the dis-enclosure of Christianity” affect art.  It looks at moments when the forces of art affect the dis-enclosure of Christianity.  The consequence is to understand a trend of dis-enclosure in the realm of art and how this occurrence affects art, its creator, and the world at large.  By understanding this relationship, those related to art might be better equipped to offer freedom and liberation from suffering.  I investigate these concerns in the following sections: I. Introduction, II. The Equation and the World, III. Art off the Wall, IV. Introduction to the Critique of the Wall, V. Critique of the Wall, VI. Quantity and the Wall, VII. Drawing the Line, VIII. Crisis of Sense and Its Reason, IX. Dis-Enclosure, X. Bearing on Capital, XI. Bearing on Art, XII. Bearing and the Event, XIII. Introduction to Sense, Sensors, and Sensation, XIV. Sensors, Sense, and Sensation, XV. Adding the Subject, XVI. Subtracting the Subject, XVII. Virtual and Real as a Negotiation of Production and Reproduction, XVIII. Aesthetics and Politics Integrated via Presentation and Re-Presentation of the Image, XIX. Dis-Enclosure Reconsidered, XX. From the Work of Art to the Art of Work, XXI. Equations In-Between, XXII. Passing Exception, XXIII. Coordinating Organizations, XXIV. Rendering, and XXV. Organizing Codes.

“Modalities of Work” is the most overtly philosophical text that I have written.  Although drawing heavily on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, this work exists entirely without quotation.  It is concerned with ideas as such and the definitions that are required.  The primary goal of this essay is to locate art through experience.  I begin this investigation by looking at how art occurs in different media situated throughout the city and, in particular, through how “art” is situated in museums.  This is followed by an historical discussion of the evolution of the museum in New York.  I investigate how a hierarchy is created through how the museum sits spatially.  This hierarchy is extended to the interior of the museum.  In order to “understand” this hierarchy and the works that are organized, I investigate different systems of thought and use them to see each work in a museum. Art “works” through this system by provoking judgment that results in language through discourse.  Work is understood as media in advertisements and catalogues and as a number indicating a price or value.  This value can be seen in the connection of the entity to an economy, allowing it to play a role in a broader realm through its exceptional status and giving it a role in rites and rituals.  In this sense, I move from locating art to asking what system governs its location.  The image that allows for the work of art to be exchanged within a broader economy is made of various parameters.  These parameters – duration of time spent with the canvas, availability of certain materials, cost of rent for a studio, relationship to other artists, interaction with collectors, dexterity of the artist’s body, afflictions that the artist lives with, etc… – extend independently as forces in the world.  It is possible to see past a definition of art that requires it to become whole before it can be evaluated via the theological, teleological, tautological, or ontological and to works of art defined by the relation of forces.  The relationship between these forces is ultimately structured by a process of information that defines the rendering and resolution of these forces.

This essay is concerned with the relationship between the medium in which art occurs and the content of the work.  In addition, 40 Meters High examines the relationship between the work and the context in which it is presented.  I begin by considering the work of an artist making what appears to be paintings while actively stating that he works beyond paint through a series of moments and tactics that support the painters argument.  From these examples, I arrive at a worldview defined by dreams, liberation, and freedom.  The location and presence of Miro’s signature within the field of the canvas traces changing forms and figures with which he might have identified and enhances a territorial, cartographic, and subjectively inhabited understanding of the surface of his work.  This worldview and the possibility that paintings might be read as maps of a city or world becomes the departure point for asking how the museums functions both in the context of the works presented, more broadly as an apparatus for viewing art, and as a site within the city.  I consider these questions both directly in terms of Miro and the Pompidou and more generally.  Through this analysis, I discuss how context affects judgment.  Ultimately, I characterize the role of the museum in the contemporary city – agreeing with Lewis Mumford’s claim that the city has become a museum.  Through a careful unpacking of the distinction between home and museum through an analysis of the evolution of museum out of the palace, I suggest that the museum is one specific type of exhibit among many that teaches us specific things about how we might live and relate to each other.