Flowers For Socrates

This is why I always wanted my own bulldozer…

(2015) Artist Michael Heizer, in the Nevada desert for 43 years, returns to New York City with a pair of $2 million rocks

The “global jet-set art circuit” is of course a circuit of capital, which requires in an age of the 1%, the patronage and power of individuals and institutions, and of course there are the differences among race, class and gender that have made participating in these scalar cultural activities more difficult in a digital age of reproduction.

One research problem that has been a thread in my cultural work is that of reconciling the material and the ideal as though thinking of that binary as conflicting ideologies is certainly both timeless and timely, yet vitally virtual, even as a political economy.

Even as one gets glimpses of the jet-set art circuit, one gets the feeling that because it is built on wealth that was built on inequality, that is why one should try to level the playing field, but what means are necessary when one has no resources or patrons. These are as Foucault says, unlike an earlier age when monument generate historical documents, these documents as mediated photographs, generate media monuments.

Much has been said about the dangerous impact of a superficial, lifestyle-based, money-oriented culture: it has often been invoked as the explanation for why people become passive, docile, and easy to manipulate irrespective of how disadvantageous their economic conditions are.

Following the illustrative critique of two eminent proponents of this criticism, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the culture of our times is endangered by the uncontrollable expansion of the culture industry into higher artistic production—manipulating the masses into passivity and cultivating false needs.1

“Art” that produces standardized cultural goods reflects a peculiar type of aestheticization of the everyday world: a dream-like immersion into mass-produced commodities.

This immersion is equivalent to the adoption of behavioral stereotypes and tastes linked to a continuously advertised petit-bourgeois phantasmagoria, and also reflects the advanced commodification of social life. 

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