save the arts, kill the artist
- aka "i'm only asking artists whose work i like to not be pieces of shit with no self respect!! is that so much to ask?!!! is it so hard?!!!!!!"
i read this article yesterday and it is so so good.
it is a very nice spicy read about the artist's role in classism. trying 2 navigate the art world as a student and then art worker, the class distinction felt Very Obvious but also Not Talked About. you don't talk about class, because so much of the art world revolves around having wealth and perpetuating wealth. and the wealthy don't talk about class because it erodes the facade of art for arts sake, it ruins the mythmaking.
#side-note-personal-rant-time
it's the same art world elitism and privilege that allowed my filthy rich boss1 to complain to me about her huge diamond ring not being as shiny as another dealer's huge diamond ring, meanwhile she won't pay for my dental and my teeth are rotting. mind you, that job could absolutely afford to pay for that, but they've skimmed me out of my money at any chance they could. see: the fact that they gave the person replacing me a 10k salary raise because no one would take the job at the salary i was making. anyways, may all my bosses get smacked (prayer hands). amen.
i guess this is now about my experience with labor exploitation, but a lot of grievances can be boiled down to, "capitalism sucks and the art world is no exception". the way that me and my coworkers were constantly belittled and micro-managed and dealing with an insufferable cast of narcissist higher ups paying us way too little and being totally erratic. i'm really sad the cancel art galleries instagram page stopped updating, though i can see why.
i wanted to talk a bit more about my experience in academia, but not now. the long story short is, i excelled as a student and had a mentor early on in school, a professor who i admired a lot and whose work was very, ~social justice~. i ended up interning for her in my freshman year and ever since i've worked for her part time in the studio. i pretty much absorbed her lessons and took a lot of it to heart.
i couldn't tell you at what point i started to resent them, but this time last year i was really close to a mental breakdown and it certainly didn't help to receive a nasty passive agressive email about a 2 second pdf fix and make it seem like it was SUCH a devastating issue that i'm wasting her time and money by having to ......re-edit a pdf to fix a hyperlink.
by that point i had been so burnt out working a full time job, a part time job, and freelancing on top of that. this is the same artist who claims to be for the working class students, who owns multiple real estate properties. what, you couldn't afford the 1/60th hr of minimum wage to pay me to make a revision? despite me making her wife's2 paintings that sell for more than my net worth? d'oh. anyways, i quit that job shortly after. now i can sleep better at night. 
back to the article...
i wanted to highlight some sections that i really liked, commentary may be minimal here 
the artist as the court jester
in response to this statement about uh,, ~using the blockchain as an art piece and the concept of DAO~:
- "...Herndon and Dryhurst celebrate this new form of collectivity not through a reasoned argument about the blockchain’s advantages, but by mythmaking, by creating an intuitive emotional way of understanding it."
This incredibly revealing quote admits in plaintext to near indifference about the subject of study, to a total absence of rigorous investigation. The superficiality of the art process laid bare should really give pause to the artists in question, were they not self absorbed in the importance of their 'myths'.
The allusion to mythmaking is really telling: the artist understands themself as one who creates narratives (that is a common thread through contemporary artist verbiage, and we'll get back to that), but the artist doesn't ask for whose sake. In the case of crypto, an intently arcane financial device where the obscurity of the system is part of its selling point to those who want to evade tax and regulations, this mythology serves some very specific interests over others. What some artists will call poetic myths functions quite transparently as the propaganda arm of these techs, that are just in practice extremely destructive investment vessels. In other words, it's artwashing.
take a shot every time you see an artist trying to hop on the nft hype train (wait no- )
the artist as the bourgeois failson
- about artists who can afford to be artists because wealthy parents:
I had a bit here in my draft where i compared artists to feudal clergy (a place where the spare sons of the nobles were sent, so that the first heir could inherit the estate without competition, while the other sons could be kept contained in an institution where they can further the position of their family with connections and ideology manufacture BUT would not have legitimate heirs of their own) - the idea being that bourgeois artists are similarly failsons of the bourgeois who don't have the capacity to inherit their forebears fortune, so they're sent to The Arts so they can just make their dynasty look better while not building a meaningful corporate empire that could threaten the unity of the estate. This comparison isn't really rigorous at all so i won't spend more time on it, i just thought the concept of a bourgeois failson containment zoo was funny.
i too, thought the concept of a bourgeois failson containment zoo was funny. but they are not wrong, this reminds me a lot of the sacklers3 using art institutions to squeaky clean their name. it's clear that art institutions hide behind the ideology of ~philanthropy~ and ~being for the public good~. (whose public is purdue beneficial for?)
- look! we are ~philanthropists~ in art and because ~Art is Good, We are Good~ just don't ask us how we got our money.
nfts as a farce and if you criticize it you Just Don't Get It, simpleton
- a.k.a., i don't know how to conclude this post
to rewind back to an earlier section, the author includes this quote from hito steyerl, who continues to rock my world:
At the moment, art is an excuse, or a pretext maybe, to roll out the infrastructure: the cryptoinfrastructure, the Web 3.0 infrastructure. And the slogan is this magic spell of the N.F.T. It’s really a magic spell, because it doesn’t mean anything! It just means: I own you, and somehow, by magic cryptoincantations, I will enter it on the blockchain. But because it sounds complicated or high-tech, it draws so much attention, right?
It’s just basically a mechanism of disinformation. The more confusing it gets, the more attention is drawn or used up by it. It really does seem that the rhetoric around N.F.T.s — and around crypto more generally, I’d say — draws so much on the modernist figure of the artist. Individual creativity, free of institutions, finally unleashed.
I mean, I’m witnessing it at least for the third time: this implementation of new infrastructure with the same kind of sloganeering and propaganda. “It will be more democratic. It will be more accessible. There will be equal opportunity. Everyone will get information. The middlemen will be taken out.” I mean, how often am I going to hear it? How often are people going to fall for it?
the article continues on about who gets to be considered an artist, and the art made by and for the working class and the concept behind gramsci's theory of intellectuals. it's pretty good and you should just read the article if you haven't by now because the ideas are summed up way better than i can. hito steyerl (from what i can tell) has had the pulse for a while on the further disenfranchising of the working class that is brought on by technology and the fallacy that silicon valley will free us.
lastly, i just wanted to shout out this lil section in the artist as the entrepreneur:
- Great track Colin but what does any of this mean. It's sounds!
This use of language as a tool for obfuscation of meaning, rather than real rigorous analysis, is extremely common among entrepreneurs where aesthetic hype cycles are central to investor pitches that the entire economic order relies on. (It is similarly common in academia, but i don't have a real take on academia to shoehorn here).
i laughed because so many artist statements read like this. plzzzzzz spare me (╥﹏╥) 
uhhh
i have some more thoughts but i've been at it long enough. head empty and stomach empty. maybe in a future post (lol)...
xoxo for now,
- cinni ★彡
