Re: <nettime> re art & monetary value -- "art in the information economy"

[bronac ferran <bronacf@gmail.com>]

Dear Michael

I'm puzzled by many of the gaps in your analysis that appear to elide
any recognition of the long history of collectivist and relational
production, whether formally or informally engendered. Is this also an
illustration of your desire (expressed earlier) for heroic, aesthetic,
greatness as embodied in the individual practice held together by an
assemblage of aura and market recognition? I'm sure it is not but
there are many other states of mind that prevail within the quest for
cultural capital, some of which can be perused in texts available to
read here
<https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/code/rel_texts.html>

See for example Steve Beard's text  'The Anthropofferjist Charles
Dickens "Wapping Ghost-Ship" by the "Mass Transit Lounger" (a.k.a.
Steve Beard) anti-copyright'

<https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/code/texts/beard.html>

all best wishes

Bronac



On Fri, 2 Apr 2021 at 06:21, Michael Goldhaber <michael@goldhaber.org> wrote:

> Sandra,
>
> I was delighted to see your name after so long. I have to admit though, while impressed with your zeal for compendiousness and classification, I did not get much out of either of the pieces you posted.
>
> Let me mention a couple of problems I had. In the first piece you cite the idea that “cultural capital” is diminished by the decline of the state. You never specify which state or states you are talking about. Are your examples of declining states the same as those you mention in the second piece as “repressive states,” e.g., fascist Germany, Italy or Japan; or just as much the Soviet Union, which had disappeared only a little before your publication dates?
>
> Since you cite Valery writing in 1939, maybe you mean something like the French Second Empire and its fin-de-siecle snobbish followers, the kind of people that forced the Impressionists to secede from the official Salon, or the still surviving and still overly dominant French Academy? The British Empire might fit there too, with its emphasis on classical education for the “establishment.” Or perhaps the princely states of colonial India? The Mandarinate in China? The pre-colonial African kingdoms?  At one point you mention the decline of the welfare state; is that what is meant?
>
> At any rate, exactly what cultural capital is supposed to mean and whether its hypothesized decline would be good or bad seems uncertain. In small societies with mostly unwritten histories or stories, perhaps cultural capital is desirable, though a different case could also be made. In more literate societies CC has an unavoidable tinge of snobbism.(In that regard, your citing of Derrida, Bourdieu, Baudrillard and the like could be taken as a flaunting of questionable cultural capital as one-upmanship.)
>
> To engage in something similar myself, I happen to love some of the great works of Jackson Pollock. I note that in the entire piece on “Art in the Information Economy,’ you have only half a sentence in which the word “exalt” is used and nothing else whatsoever about what Marcuse referred to as “the Aesthetic Dimension.”
>
>  You don’t say who won the court case about Pollocks, but if the plaintiff won, he would probably have found that all unsigned or otherwise unproven actual Pollocks would have fallen precipitously in value. The only possible salvation would have been an intense reliance on connoisseurship—experts testifying that certain pieces clearly have the beauty of a true Pollock— again a form of (snobbish) cultural capital.
>
> A related issue, which you also take up and try to explicate in the piece on “information creators”—a phrase I wish you hadn’t come up with— has to do with claims of “the death of the author,” a notion also quoted by Molly Hankwitz. It’s a bad metaphor offered by panjandrums of post-modern(?) cultural criticism, with, it seems to me very little historical evidence.  While we know nothing or almost that about the writer or writers of the Iliad and Odyssey or much of “Holy Scripture,” not only do more recent authors tend to come into clearer and clearer focus, but most are not at all interchangeable. They are not just the community writing together. Dickens isn’t either of the Brontes nor George Eliot. And so on.
>
> While much journalism, for instance, is undoubtedly banal, there is reason that while the byline might once have merely been “Our Correspondent,” today the reporters, critics and columnists are almost all individually identified. It’s true that—far more than in the past—editors, copy-editors and fact-checkers somewhat homogenize the works, but individuality remains highly significant—except perhaps for Wikipedia.
>
> Nettime of course has a minimum of editing, so less homogenization, but still, every discussion reveals the non-death of  “the author.”
>
>
> Best,
>
> Michael
>
>
> On Mar 28, 2021, at 7:41 AM, Sandra Braman <bramansandra@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This piece from 1996 on art and various forms of capital in the digital world has some things to say that are pertinent to this interesting conversation. You'll see some theorists not as present in ongoing conversation these days as they were then, but I stand on the piece.
>
> "Art in the Information Economy"
> http://people.tamu.edu/~braman/bramanpdfs/011_art.pdf
>
> Sandra Braman
>
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM <nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org> wrote:
>>
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>> Today's Topics:
>>
>>    1. Re: what does monetary value indicate? (Molly Hankwitz)
>>    2. Re: what does monetary value indicate? (Brian Holmes)
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 18:50:30 -0700
>> From: Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>
>> To: Michael Goldhaber <michael@goldhaber.org>
>> Cc: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
>> Subject: Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?
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>>
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>> Or, maybe, originality has been all along, a fictional history, and a
>> signifier for fictional social relations in much art history, if only to
>> justify value through ?scarcity? (genius and originality are rare) or
>> create its justification (there is only one original) and to obscure modes
>> of artistic production not about ?sole? authorship and individual
>> creativity? Somewhere along the line, ?originality? was seen to be a
>> valuable asset in art making, taught, told, produced, encouraged, and then
>> it died many deaths as a concept; as something to strive for or achieve or
>> practice or expect? ?Death of the author?, digital reproducibility,
>> post-medium conditions, AI Art, all seemingly question or consider at least
>> art without ?originality?.
>> We have replaced this expectation instead with collectivity, collaboration,
>> stakeholders, or, much more importantly, maybe, the artist as an ?original?
>> interpreter of systems. So, I?m thinking that the new artist might be more
>> akin to an economist who comprehends the communication of value or an
>> artist who digs deeply into AI enough to transform it...originally. This
>> appears to me by way of Paglen, Steryel, and others to be a trend. Artist
>> as ?administrative author? or initiator of a system, through which
>> communities can act, somewhat recursively to establish value, and/or
>> prosper via, for instance, a shared currency?
>>
>> (Fresh from MoneyLab events)
>>
>> Molly
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 4:02 PM Michael Goldhaber <michael@goldhaber.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > On Mar 27, 2021, at 1:27 PM, Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > ..how original is original when originality died long ago ?
>> >
>> >
>> > Yes, originality died with the second cave painting, but has been reborn
>> > many times since, even if only evident to new generations. Depending  on
>> > the fineness of your mesh, it is always relatively rare, and thus, with so
>> > many trying for it today, perhaps easily not seen. But I bet still around.
>> >
>> >
>> > Best,
>> >
>> > Michael
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>>
>>
>> molly hankwitz - she/her
>> http://bivoulab.org
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>> Message: 2
>> Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 23:28:14 -0500
>> From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
>> To: Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>
>> Cc: a moderated mailing list for net criticism
>>         <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
>> Subject: Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?
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>> On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 8:51 PM Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>
>> asked:
>>
>> Artist as ?administrative author? or initiator of a system, through which
>> > communities can act, somewhat recursively to establish value, and/or
>> > prosper via, for instance, a shared currency?
>> >
>>
>> I am fascinated by the concept of the artist as "initiator of a system,"
>> it's the most profound and still-relevant notion of art to come out of the
>> late 20th century. To initiate a system is to open up the field in which
>> something like orientation or valuation can take place. Exactly what the
>> orientations and values must be is not initially prescribed, but still, the
>> coordinates and the terms of measure are made available and shared, as we
>> all know from software and activist movements and even love (let's think
>> co-initiators).
>>
>> But the demon of contradiction wants me to take something so admirable into
>> a more troubling direction, which could have some bearing on Felix's
>> question of NFT motivations.
>>
>> There were these two dudes, I happen to know their story, Leo Melamed, the
>> star trader of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Milton Friedman - well,
>> you get the picture. Leo went to listen in on the classes given by ol' Milt
>> at the University of Chicago, notably because of the idea that in a world
>> of floating currency values, futures markets would easily emerge. Money
>> could be made from the possible future values of money - it fired Melamed's
>> imagination. When Nixon suspended the Bretton Woods treaties and opened up
>> the floating world, Leo commissioned Milt to write an authoritative paper,
>> and the two co-initiators went to Washington to institute a new world
>> order. Legal to boot. Friedman rang the bell at the opening of the
>> International Monetary Market on May 16, 1972. It opened up the entire
>> computational space of financial derivatives. You can read Melamed's prose
>> if you're curious, but you gotta see the look on Friedman's face:
>> https://bit.ly/3rvC1t8
>>
>> NFTs are gesturing toward a new market, a hitherto unknown territory of
>> abstraction. For a financier this would be the equivalent of the voyages of
>> discovery - Christopher Columbus. The everyday lives will get colonized
>> later on. Right now these people have the sense of establishing, not just
>> an asset class, but something new under the sun. They feel like world
>> movers.
>>
>> The weird thing is that I think many of us can imagine it, at least a
>> little bit. Do you remember what it was like, co-initiating
>> social-computational systems? Maybe you still do it?
>>
>> Around that time back in the early 70s, the conceptual artist Marcel
>> Broodthaers was ironically exploring what he called "the conquest of
>> space." It was about Columbus and the art market and the Apollo Program.
>> Certainly with the symbolic space they opened up - now the Globex trading
>> platform -  Friedman and Melamed oriented the whole neoliberal period. They
>> discovered a new America. They created and administrated what you might
>> call an effective abstraction, which has not yet ceased to govern the vast
>> lifeworlds of just-in-time production and distribution. This is the
>> terrifying other side of initiating systems.
>>
>> NFTs are not going to rule the world. This is an attempted conquest of
>> art-market space. But the desire it attempts to symbolize is significant.
>> What kind of currency would a computational oligarchy need for the era of
>> accelerated technological change and asymptotically granular population
>> control that is emerging as a possibility right now, through the ubiquitous
>> applications of AI? In the best of cases this would have to be a truly
>> common currency, enabling resilience, adaptation, transformation for the
>> future 9 billions of human earthlings - and infinite other species. In the
>> worst of cases, it would be the currency of a veritable state-financial
>> nexus, the kind David Harvey talks about, where privatized monetary
>> creation is the enabler of hyper flexible bureaucratic control.
>>
>> Frankly, just reading the newspapers, I see a huge struggle going on over
>> the initiation of systems. Either you get eco-socialism, or you get the
>> nexus.
>>
>> Meanwhile I see lots of artists trying to invent new blockchain currencies.
>> But who is the Marcel Broodthaers of the onrushing AI era? And how would
>> *they* express themselves?
>>
>> curiously, Brian
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-- 
Bronaċ
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