‘the art world is not the world’

 

Art, General Culture

“We are afloat in a world in which the endless invocation of theoreticians, philosophers and political theorists serves very little purpose other than to bolster the cultural capital pretensions of an artworld detached from anything other than its communicative connectivity and its obscure economic value in an economy of fleeting and faddish desires.” - source

and more (further down): “Battles, political, artistic or philosophical, are no longer waged within language, which is precisely why we have so few meaningful debates. The hallmark of Nu-language is its inability to be refuted. If someone says something that doesn’t really make sense, it is impossible to oppose it, except to criticise the terms of the language itself. […]

“it is in the artworld that we perhaps most often see the ill-digested consequence of the non-positions of nu-language. To take just one example: a recent conference on the idea of ‘Art after Aesthetic Distance’ states as its remit the following:

Their projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships. Art historian Miwon Kwon stated that such work ‘no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process’.

“To ‘mediate’ ‘frameworks’ as ‘relationships’… one could switch the terms around with similar effect: to ‘framework mediations as relationship’, or perhaps to ‘relate mediations as frameworks’. The art historian quoted above is quite right to state that ‘such work’ likes to think of itself as a process rather than an object – if it stood still for more than five minutes someone might just notice that it makes absolutely no sense at all.”