Wanted for Realising the Value of the Monte Carlo Bond; Money Art (2014), GCGCA(i)

Money Art

An Aesthetic Seal Of Expanded Reproduction?

Deutsche Bundesbank Money Museum, Frankfurt

23 Sep - 21 Dec 2014

The temporal formalism of 'the new’, which Walter Benjamin described as ‘the new’ as the ‘ever-same’, is an abstract temporal formalism, which is as real as the abstractions of the value form, from which its social substantiation derives. ‘The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded reproduction’, Adorno once wrote. In other words, the expansion of consumption as a condition of the expanded reproduction of capital. Or, the commodification of novelty as the means for the capitalistic appropriation of desire.

However the effect of the sustained repetition of the abstract temporal formalism of ‘the new’, which is the primary temporal determination of the distribution of the commodity form, has been to further reduce whatever qualitative historical novelty that logic of modernism retained - in any particular instance - by virtue of a further reduction to the notion of ‘the contemporary’, and the problem with the concept of the contemporary is that it spatializes novelty, by making co-presence the condition of the conjunction of the times that it holds together.

Realising the Value of the Monte Carlo Bond; Money Art (2014), GCGCA(i)

But although art is a commodity, it is not commodified at the level of production. It is commodified primarily through distribution and exchange. In Marx’s terms it is only ‘formally’ subsumed. The peculiarity of art production is that it is petty-commodity production within the latest state of development of capitalism. Art production itself remains petty-commodity production. To the extent that art production becomes fully commodified, it becomes just one part of the culture industry. So there is a distinction between autonomous art and the culture industry, in terms of the difference of the logic of production from commodity production. This doesn’t separate the work from the commodity relations of exchange and distribution.

Artworks image the political freedom of the ideal bourgeois liberal individual. It’s the function of the arts to maintain the ideal political image of the liberal individual, who is the basis for neoliberalism. Famously, exchange relations break down historically received collective meanings. Capitalistic sociality produces 'individuals' who are united only in the mutual alienation of their sociability, in a form of what Kant called 'asocial sociability'. Yet such individuality has provided the model of freedom in capitalist societies; hence the political centrality of liberalism and libertarianism to capitalist societies.

The subject-like quality of the autonomous art work as a self-determining form (its own self-legislating ‘law of form’) presents itself as behaving like a subject, and thereby mimics the self-positing structure of the accumulation of capital - the automatic subjectivity of capital. It exhibit's the structure of the production of an act. The main ‘object’ (in the phenomenological sense) that behaves like a subject is capital. Art works mirror capital, in each case, via the alienated form of their own mediated objectivity.

The issue is not so much the internality of autonomous art to the structure of capitalist societies via its own commodity status (the contradictory character of the art commodity). What is more significant is the internality of the formal structure of capitalist societies to the formal structure of productions of meaning in autonomous art, not qua ‘commodity’ but precisely qua ‘autonomous’. It’s actually in its autonomy that autonomous art is capitalistic, not primarily in its commodity status, which is mundane.

Installation view: Money Art (2014), GCGCA(i)