Here are some of my thoughts about why art will always be relevant to politics and life
Franco Berardi is wrong to think that art and poetry have been swept into the machine of semio-capitalism. Berardi correctly identifies that segments of both visual art and poetry have been co-opted by capitalism and thus have lost critical relevance, yet Berardi fails to recognize that there has also been a large amount of reflexivity in the arts responding to the heightened control exercised by capitalism and ignores the evolution of art after the development of Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. Berardi’s ability to recognize the evolution of capitalism through the internet, but not of the arts, undermines the credibility of his argument. In this paper I will highlight this problem as it manifests in Berardi’s book Precarious Rhapsody and work to mitigate it by arguing that the internet has created niches, some of which are terminally infected with capitalism, others that are at war with it, and a full scope in between. I will argue that art and poetry are in a struggle with semio-capitalism, and that artists have found new ways to express empathy and desire, even as capitalists have been able to commodify art like never before. In order to support this claim, I will draw on contemporary developments in poetry and the arts and will conclude that not only is art far from dead, but in some niches it is undermining semio-capitalism.
Art, poetry, capitalism and information dynamics have all changed since the turn of the Twentieth century, by extension and concurrently society as a whole has changed. Berardi makes a strong argument that the demands of semio-capitalism have infected society with mass ‘illness’ which people are attempting to treat with evermore products, this diagnosis is correct, but over extended. Instead of the psychotic homogeneous mass characterized by Berardi, Tiziana Terranova explains that the information age has lead to the development of a segmented and hyper-specialized population, she explains, “the rise of the concept of information has contributed to the development of new techniques for collecting and storing information that have simultaneously attached and reinforced the macroscopic moulds of identity” (Tarranova, 34). In other words, the internet is creating a hybridized mass that is both homogenous and differentiated into enumerable niches, thus the decomposition and recombination of the mass is being facilitated by the internet. Berardi does not account for this segmentation of the populous. He instead suggests that under the banner of semio-capitalism society has become more uniform than ever. He uses art as an expression of the twisted unanimity of the world. This, despite enumerable contemporary examples of art and poetry which demonstrate that the art world is far from uniform, and indeed is rich with empathy, proclivity, and a healthy Avant-garde.
Berardi argues that creativity has been captured by the market and by war and that the artistic expressions of the populous have become commoditized by the ignorant greed of capitalist puppeteers. He asserts that the commercialization of art has never existed as it does today and that this has been facilitated by the rise of network technologies. Berardi links the transformation of art’s role in society to the success of the Futurist art movement in which Fillippo Marinetti called for the marriage of art and technology. Berardi argues that to an extent Marinetti’s dream was realized, he writes, “Thanks to the technology of the mass media, language is becoming the main site of social confrontation. Poetry, the language which creates shared worlds has entered the sphere of social change… in this sphere, poetry meets advertising and scientific thought meets the enterprise” (Berardi, 18). Language, both verbal and visual have become the means for expressions of revolution, yet language has also become the tool through which capitalism communicates. Therefore, as art has been hijacked by capital, ergo all that language can convey is the message desired by capitalism: consume more.
With counter culture artists like David Choe splashing colorful murals over the walls of the Facebook headquarters, and street artist phonon Shepherd Fairy donating his talents to creating posters of the neoliberal Presidential candidate Barak Obama, it would seem that Berardi’s thesis about the capitalist capture of art is correct. Even artists who made their names pushing against the norms of contemporary society are complacent to functioning within that system, yet the predicate of this argument contradicts Berardi’s assertion. Although contemporary artists have worked within the capitalist framework, many of the most influential have made their names lambasting and critiquing that system.
Berardi makes room for the proliferation of crucial art by claiming that art critical of societal structures is a symptom of society’s collective sickness. He argues that this can be asserted because art currently being produced is highly ironic and dystopian, he writes, “Only today, at the beginning of the twenty first century, does dystopia take center stage and conquest the whole field of the artistic imagination, thus drawing the narrative horizon of the century with no future (Berardi, 133).” While this diagnosis is so broad it can admittedly capture any counter culture movement within or oblivious to the art world, it is indeed too broad to account for the diversity of content currently being produced. It is in the failure of Berardi’s platitudes that the argument of societal nichification gains credibility.
Contemporary art can be broken into several schools. To start there is the digerati wallpaper art of the action houses and biennale. This grouping adds credence Berardi’s argument of haywire capitalism stripping meaning from existence and arts compliancy to the process. Damian Hirst and Jeff Koons are the poster boys of this segment of the art world; both farm produce primarily shallow conceptual art and extradite as much cash as possible from the work. The artists have been able to create astronomical price tags for their art by extending the model provided by Pop Art, which was the tangled product of capitalism, society, and art, and oddly is never mentioned by Berardi. Contemporary market art is primarily responsible for the pollution of corporate offices with multi-million dollar works and the massive bubble in the art market. Its essence can be captured by the investment banker Steven Choen paying $12 million for a rotting taxidermy tiger shark that Hirst spent $50,000 getting stuffed- sick indeed.
Another segment of contemporary art is street art. The street art movement gained traction around the same time Warhol was pissing on rugs for gobs of money. The homeless outside artist Jean Michel Baptiste rose to fame through his graffiti around New York City in the mid 1970’s. Other outsider artists decorated the concrete and steel ant colony of the modern city with individualist expressions of self with graffiti tags. By the dawn of the twenty-first century this had evolved into the whole scale production of art in public places. Artists in this school like Banksy, Jef Aeosol, Swoon and Neck Face to name a few, have taken art closer to the masses, forcing people to confront it and it messages without paying to enter the elite white cube of the gallery.
There is no official dogma behind street art even as by default of its presence it criticizes the status quo. This complicates Berardi’s claim that art is more dystopian than ever before, especially when one considers the zeitgeist of two world wars imbued in surrealism and Dadaism, two movements that were relatively contemporary to Futurism. Take the latest street artist ‘it’ guy JR. The twenty-six-year-old, a member of Berardi’s connective generation, the generation that has allegedly learned more words from machines than from their mothers takes photographs of people living in periphery communities urban, slum, forgotten, and uses digital technology make massive prints of the photos. He pasts the prints in the communities. The installations draw attention to the communities, compel people swap stories, ask difficult questions and challenge the status quo. In other words, JR’s installations of novel art are rich with empathy and desire, two touchstones of humanity that Berardi thinks are disappearing. JR says of his art, "It's about breaking down barriers…With humour, there is life” (Day, 1).
Berardi’s argument that all art today is more dystopian then ever is strange. He seems to have written the review without going the gallery. It is hard to imagine he could be completely ignorant to the feminist work of contemporary classics like Nancy Sparrow, whose art is reactive to the untenable masculine fantasies of the ilk of Marinetti, yet he seems oblivious, or at least too depressed to open his eyes. Thus far I have given the briefest snapshot of two rich schools of contemporary art and shown that art is has become segmented. Furthermore, there are status symbols that are being called art, but there is also relevant emotionally charged art being created in response to problems that can be linked to semio-capitalism. Before returning to Berardi’ arts elegies, his tandem attack on poetry must be addressed.
Similar to contemporary art, Berardi believes the modernist vision of poetry as a revolutionary force has been realized, but co-opted by market forces. This argument is supported by discourses in the field of poetry, where more material than ever before is being produced, but readership has declined, and the entire field is seemingly marked by market forces. Ron Silliman captures development succinctly writing:
In short, the rise of a professional caste of ‘specialized’, or more accurately, bureaucratized readers occurred precisely at the moment when a new set of dynamics, characterized by such concepts as market position, penetration, and share, began to reorganize the distribution of what had for a long time been a fixed output. Thus corporate collaboration with the leadership of this new caste at least appeared to offer commanding control over the future of the market itself. (Silliman, 237)
The proliferation of new poetry and is astounding by any measure, but it is no longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has instead become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group that is fed by a capital loop driven and arguably determined by publishing houses.
The development of market driven poetry, along with the market use of poetic technique adds credibility to Berardi’s argument, yet there are still missed vistas. Many poets may be writing toilet paper commercials, but because of market forces, more than ever before are able to create their art. Furthermore, Berardi provides no evidence that poetry was every mass consumed. Increasingly, the voice of poetry as a social force is being found in the lyrics of music, which are almost always written using a classic poetic technique. With the digitalization of music an individual can store millions of songs and with a click hear Freddy Mercury croon in iambic pentameter that he wants to break free. This development suggests that poetry as become more mainstream and accessible to the mass then everbefore.
Once again Berardi’s argument that poetry, like art, has lost its ability to be meaningful is mystifying. He writes, “…when irony becomes a mass language, power loses ground, authority and strength. (Berardi, 21)” it may be true that when irony becomes mass languages it becomes meaningless, but this has not been realized. Many contemporary poetic voices like Toni Morrison and Elizabeth Anderson are un-ironic and pointedly challenge contemporary norms, continuing the artistic tradition of sowing seeds for social change.
Although a disturbing number of Marinetti’s ideals have survived, modernism was by no means the end of art as Berardi appears to gravely believe. Marcel Duchamp may have made everything art, and Marinetti may have called for the marriage of art and life, yet our poets are not writing in words in freedom as Marrintti espoused, nor are our most important artists creating purely conceptual work. Berardi writes, “Artists no longer search the way to a rupture, and how could they? They seek a path that leads to a state of equilibrium between irony and cynicism that allows them to suspend the execution, at least for a moment. (Berardi,135)” He is right to note that art has changed, but as I have showed, it is still relevant, artist are upsetting the equilibrium. They are not only cynical and ironic but they are also reacting to the development of hyper capitalism, they can and are creating beauty and their criticism is relevant. Berardi should take heed; art may be what can lead the way away from our diseased capitalist system.
Were Berardi to dig around enough he might be able to identify more niches in the art world to support his claims, there are the fascinating digital artists like David Hockney , who are making art on entirely new mediums, the capitalist foe street artist’s like Mr. Brainwash who are capitalizing on the novelty of the form, and of course the artists writing toilet paper commercials. Were he to seriously delve into what has been happening in the art world rather than pontificating about what art should be accomplishing, perhaps artists would pay more attention to his necessary warnings about the health of the world and risks of semio-capitalism. As it is, ridiculous claims like, “By the beginning of the twenty first century the long history of the artistic Avant-garde was over” (Berardi,128). Strip his credibility. The implications of such claims are disturbing and extremely nearside. Werner Herzog’s latest film The Cave of Forgotten Souls, reminds us that the production of art is fundamentally human. It is evocative of the human soul. Herzog’s exploration of cave drawing 32,000 years old, reminds the view that thought the glue may have dried on the seat of the Futurist Theater, art is not dead, nor will it die.
Works cited:
Atlantic Monthly 5 (Apr. 1991). Collected in Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1992) 1-24.
Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto, 2004. Print.
Beardi “Bifo” Franco. Precarious rhapsody Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the Post alpha generation . London, 2009. Print.
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