the art world is not the world [x-posted from Infinite Thought]
1. Swinging from the Canapes When I grow up I want to be...a freelance curator. Of all the jobs spawned by the increasingly rapacious culture industry, this one has it all: connectivity that is itself creative, and vice versa. Who wouldn’t want to be a freelance curator in this brave new world of deracinated galleries and the unfettered celebration of the productive power of networking? Sure, it’s precarious, but isn’t everything these days, and, yes, it might all disappear in a puff of smoke, but that’s just the nature of creative destruction isn’t it? All hail creativity! And, hey, you should really check out my new show... The freelance curator is the immaterial labourer par excellence. Consisting almost entirely of contacts, human or otherwise, and operating by means of a series of associative strategies, this knowledge-worker in the realm of the imagination understands that what the world needs more than anything is a network of innovation – a kind of profitable glee in plugging things in. We could treat this psycho-social type structurally, as a kind of excrescence thrown up by a combination of the weightlessness of cultural forms combined with the realisation that actual, material products are just so nineteenth century. We could even be charitable, and think of the artworld as a kind of playground for theoretical experimentation. Peter Osborne argues that with the decline of independent Left political-intellectual cultures, the artworld remains, ‘for all its intellectual foibles, the main place beyond the institutions of higher education where intellectual and political aspects of social and cultural practices can be debated, and where these debates can be transformed.’ more... http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2008/03/the-art-world-i.html#more _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
