R O U N D T A B L E - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

R O U N D T A B L E

Art UNDEr NEOLIBErALIsM

This roundtable focuses on the signifi cance, Möglichkeiten, and chal-
lenges of artistic practice and criticism under neoliberal conditions.
Recent scholarship at the intersection of the humanities and economic
theory has opened up new avenues for understanding the deep implica-
tions of neoliberalism in reshaping the whole realm of social relations
Und, even more fundamentally, our ways of behaving, perceiving, Und
engaging in the world. Beyond a set of economic policies aimed at pro-
moting free trade, the deregulation of fi nancial markets, the privatiza-
tion of welfare, and the globalization of capital, neoliberalism has come
to be regarded, in its most radical sense, as both the fundamental recon-
fi guration of individuals as “entrepreneurs of themselves” and as the
reframing of subjectivity as human capital. These crucial transforma-
tionen, which often accompanied the rise of a web-based, networked soci-
ety, cannot be dissociated from the renewed centrality of identity politics
in the public sphere. Contradicting the idea of rampant utilitarianism
and rationalization, which is repeatedly emphasized by both the advo-
cates and detractors of neoliberalism, the neoliberal stage of capitalism
is not devoid of the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”
which Marx attributed to the commodity.

We ask: Apart from the longstanding and much-debated problem
of art’s commodifi cation, how does neoliberalism transform and deter-

126

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00303

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

mine the conditions of artistic practice? Weiter, if neoliberalism is a
substantially distinct stage in the history of capitalism, and not merely
its intensification, what are the implications of this new condition for
the practice and criticism of contemporary art? What does it mean to
practice and theorize art, to be an artist or critic, under neoliberalism?
Drawing on the central topic of this issue, is aesthetic, artistic, or politi-
cal radicality in art still possible under the neoliberal condition? Can,
or should, artistic practice constitute a significant site of resistance?
Umgekehrt, is the contemporary art world a paradigmatic case of, Und
even a model for, neoliberal capitalism?

To discuss these questions, we invited a group of scholars from a
broad spectrum of methodological, politisch, and critical positions. Ihre
Beiträge, in the form of brief reflections that react and respond to
the questions above, were written independently and without knowl-
edge of other participants’ responses.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

127

arjUn aPPadUrai

bard Graduate center, new york

There are many ways in which our neoliberal era makes itself felt in
the worlds of art. We are all aware of the rapidity with which trophy
artworks are priced into the stratosphere, biennials are turned into
reputation-building markets, museums function as playgrounds for
the super-wealthy, and art from the world’s margins is pimped out by
first-world curators, critics, and connoisseurs. Do we need more rea-
sons to be worried? Alas, Ja.

The role of art today is to bring the aura back into the work of art,

this time as farce, not as any form of the sublime. Walter Benjamin
famously bemoaned the death of the aura in the era of mechanical
reproduction—the death of the specific form of duration and unique-
ness that mechanical reproduction refuses and rejects. Heute, the aura
is back, but not in the sense that Benjamin admired. Nor is it the case
that the aura has been degraded by new forms of reproduction, storage,
distribution, and pricing, which put the commodity in the place of the
singularity.

The aura has reappeared, but not in the world of art; it has entirely

shifted to the world of the commodity. This is the result of the radical
financialization of capitalism, the central sign and site of which is the
financial form known as the derivative, a contractual entity that allows
traders to bet on risk itself, and not just on the future value of a com-
modity. This sort of bet on risk is a bet on another risk, which is the
uncertainty about the future value of the underlying commodity. Als
the chain of derivatives lengthens, the underlying commodity essen-
tially vanishes, leaving only a mountain of tradeable risks. Financialized
capitalism hates the sluggish materiality of the commodity and much
prefers its unknown and vaporous future value, whereby any commod-
ity can acquire the aura of uniqueness, Distanz, and immediacy that
Benjamin saw as endangered by the growth of the commodity world.
The financial markets thus lend the aura of the sublime to the profane
world of dumb commodities and have become the true art practices
of late capitalism.

Natürlich, this version of the auratic is farcical, in the sense that
it makes fun of the aura of the sublime, the uniqueness and immediacy

128

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

that characterized the aura in its original (Benjaminian) sense. Das ist
not a simple farce, Jedoch; it is a farce in the service of a larger tragedy,
which is the massive expansion of the universe of predatory capitalism,
with debt as the source of entrepreneurial profit. The debts of ordinary
citizens are the assets that, leveraged into derivative forms, are steadily
priced and traded to create mountains of unknown future value, aus
whose exchange huge profits can be made. Zusamenfassend, the materiality
of real debt is turned into the auratic magic of future value. The larger
tragedy in which this farcical return of the aura is embedded is the trag-
edy of the discovery of future value by capital, future value on which
speculative risks can be taken and massive profits made, on the backs
of the debt slavery of the majority of mankind.

If financial markets are the new sites of the auratic in this particu-
lar moment in the neoliberal age, what is the role of artworks in studios,
auctions, museums, exhibitions, biennials, and the like? Was, in other
Wörter, is the role of the conventional work of art, however avant-garde,
radical, or inventive it might be? If financial products now do the work
of the auratic in late capitalism, does it matter anymore whether the
traditional work of art has become fully commodified, in the sense that
Benjamin mourned? Is there any link between the art world and the
financial world, with regard to the sites and experiences of the auratic
in our neoliberal times?

The deep connection between the commodification of conventional
art works (which has been going on for at least a century) and the auratic
role of financial markets in contemporary capitalism is the relocation of
risk that has occurred in the last few decades.

Mechanical reproduction, starting in the 1920s and 1930s, Wann
Benjamin first wrote about it, was the first phase in eliminating risk
from the artistic sublime. Photography, film, sound recording, Und
other mechanical forms of storage and reproduction of the work of
art aimed to remove the risks of contingency, the uncertainties of dura-
tion and the vagaries of circumstance from the circulation of aesthetic
Objekte. That effort continues today, with digital platforms, devices,
formats, and infrastructures. But that battle to eliminate risk from the
life of the work of art has lost its sense of urgency, since capitalism has
discovered its own forms for the pursuit of risk, in such instruments
as traded derivatives. Speculation is no longer most risky in the context
of the artwork, but finds its most radical forms in finance capital. Der
address of the auratic has shifted.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

ich

A
R
U
D
A
P
P
A

129

Daher, risk in the practice of art and its institutions has become
pale, because it has been replaced with another space that is much more
crucial to the neoliberal imagination than the space of commodified art.
Commodified art still has its uses, yet the art of commodification has
moved on, and its avant-garde is to be found on the trading floor, oper-
ating in the financial markets and hedge funds.

Arjun Appadurai lives in berlin and teaches at the bard Graduate center (neu

york). he writes on globalization, media, Design, and cities. his most recent book

(with neta alexander) is Failure (2019).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

130

artmargins 10:3

johanna bocKman

George mason University, Fairfax

Neoliberalism is, most fundamentally, the governance or manage-
ment of society and individuals through the market. Neoliberals call
for the expansion of markets and the minimization of the state, while
in fact they seek to expand, verwandeln, and strengthen the state. Der
Eastern European transformations after 1989, some of the most impor-
tant examples of neoliberalism, were in no way laissez-faire processes,
though many people claimed they were. States and massive corpora-
tions used their power to seize socialist companies (handing some over
to new capitalist owners, and shuttering others), to dismantle the wel-
fare systems tied to these workplaces, to lay off workers on a mass scale,
and to reorient, in a fundamental way, markets, Politik, and societies
from social well-being to individual accumulation. Here I examine this
governance through “the market” and how this impacts art.

We should first understand the term “the market.” Like capitalist
Länder, socialist countries have always had a variety of markets. In
the Soviet Union, Zum Beispiel, there were retail stores, farmers mar-
kets, and large flea markets, such as the Tishinska Market in Moscow,
as well as a labor market.1 For Karl Polanyi, one of the most important
theorists for scholars of neoliberalism, markets have existed across
human history and become a problem when they dominate society,
as they do in neoliberalism. In the words of Richard Sandbrook,
“Markets make good servants, but terrible masters.”2 When neoliber-
als call for “the market” or “the market economy,” they are in fact
asserting that hierarchical corporations, their owners, and their man-
agers, in collaboration with a new kind of authoritarian state, should
manage and control society and individuals. To realize “the market
economy,” neoliberals demand privatization; liberalization of prices,
capital, und Handel; deregulation; austerity; and an entrepreneurial self

Emily Clark Brown, “The Soviet Labor Market,” ILR Review 10, NEIN. 2 (1957): 179–200;
Galina Zhikhoreva, “Flea Markets: Searching for Gems in Junk,” Russia beyond the
Headlines, Oktober 9, 2013, https://www.rbth.com/arts/2013/10/09/flea_markets
_searching_for_gems_in_junk_30645.html.
Richard Sandbrook, “Polanyi and Post-Neoliberalism in the Global South: Dilemmas of
Re-Embedding the Economy,” New Political Economy 16, NEIN. 4 (2011): 437.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

N
A
M
K
C
Ö
B

131

to undermine workers’ power. Im Gegensatz, anti-authoritarian social-
isms—like that advocated by Karl Polanyi, which involved the abolition
of private ownership of the means of production as well as the call
for economic and political democracy, direct democratic decision
making on all technical and social-justice concerns, and markets—
would strengthen workers’ power and be distinctly non-neoliberal.3
Neoliberalism is inherently capitalist. Focusing on markets obscures
our understanding of neoliberalism.

Focusing on markets also makes socialism appear neoliberal.
Yugoslav worker self-management socialism, Zum Beispiel, relied
on markets; its firms and workers participated in global markets;
and its leaders criticized the state as part of their call for stateless
communism. If one were to ignore its socialist institutions, einschließlich
its moves toward economic democracy and the social ownership of
the means of production, Yugoslav worker self-management socialism
might superficially appear neoliberal.4 However, markets and con-
sumption functioned very differently under socialism, because they
did so within a broad set of socialist institutions.5 Within capitalism
and its inherently anti-democratic, profit-driven, hierarchical institu-
tions and aims, markets take on neoliberal management and disci-
plinary functions.

Neoliberalism adopts the shape of the terrain on which it oper-

ates, thus taking on different appearances in different places. Als
many scholars, including David Harvey, have argued, neoliberalism
is a form of accumulation by dispossession that must continuously
appropriate and commodify noncapitalist entities to survive and
expand.6 After 1989 in Eastern Europe, neoliberals distortedly incor-
porated into capitalism socialist ideas, experiments, institutions, Und
commons which they simultaneously sought to destroy. Gleichzeitig
Zeit, as Paul Almeida shows, the legacy of socialist revolution and
state-sponsored mass organizations, even while under attack by

Karl Polanyi, “ ‘Socialist Accounting’ by Karl Polanyi: With preface ‘Socialism and the
Embedded Economy,’ ” Theory and Society 45, NEIN. 5 ([1922] 2016): 385–427.
Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Cristofer Scarboro, Diana Mincyte, and Zsuzsa Gille, Hrsg., The Socialist Good Life: Desire,
Development, and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University
Drücken Sie, 2020); David Stark, “Rethinking Internal Labor Markets: New Insights from a
Comparative Perspective,” American Sociological Review 51 (August 1986): 492–504.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

132

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

Mural of Paul robeson,

Washington, dC, 2020.

Photograph by the author.

neoliberals, provided activists “a rich set of resources and experiences
to use in campaigns to resist neoliberal measures in the 1990s and
2000s.”7

Mural art in Washington, Gleichstrom, a topic of my own research, provides
a good illustration of this contest between appropriation and counterap-
propriation of anticapitalist legacies. Washington, Gleichstrom, plays a special
role in neoliberalism, as the home of the International Monetary Fund,
the World Bank, and the Washington Consensus. Jedoch, it has also
been a major center of Pan-Africanism and Pan-African socialism.8 In
gentrifying areas, African Americans have used murals, like the one of
African American communist artist Paul Robeson wearing a lapel pin of
Africa colored red, black, and green, as a form of space-claiming in the
face of white settler colonialism. Neu, gentrifying businesses even seem
to acknowledge their settler-colonial nature in their names, décor, Und
clientele. Zum Beispiel, in the center of the African American commu-
nity on Georgia Avenue, NW, sits the Colony Club cafe. Neoliberals also
appropriate and commodify murals and images of African Americans,
integrating them into neoliberal capitalism in support of the gentrifica-
tion and displacement of African Americans, which Brandi Summers
has explored.9 Neoliberalism in Washington, Gleichstrom, takes its shape from

Paul Almeida, Mobilizing Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2014), 130.

8 Michelle Coghill Chatman, “At Eshu’s Crossroad: Pan-African Identity in a Changing City,”
in Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C., Hrsg. Derek Hyra and Sabiyha
Prince (London: Routledge, 2016), 239–54.
Brandi Thompson Summers, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate
City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

N
A
M
K
C
Ö
B

133

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

exterior of the Colony Club,

Poster for african liberation day,

Washington, dC, 2020.

Photograph by the author.

Washington, dC, 2018.

Photograph by the author.

the appropriation and distortion of Pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism
and Pan-African socialism also remain “a rich set of resources and
experiences”10 for mobilizations like African Liberation Day, welche
continues to organize against neoliberalism and settler colonialism
in Washington and beyond. Neoliberals seek to appropriate mural
art into markets and capitalist institutions that support gentrification,
settler colonialism, and neoliberal capitalism, while Pan-Africanists
and others still use art to realize another world.

Johanna Bockman teaches in the Global affairs Program and the department

of sociology and anthropology at George mason University, Fairfax, va.

she is the author of Markets in the Name of Socialism: The LeftWing Origins

of Neoliberalism (2011).

10 Almeida, 130.

134

artmargins 10:3

nathalie heinich

cnrs-ehess, Paris

In the 1960s and 1970s, a title such as “Art under Neoliberalism”
would have been unthinkable: not only because the term “neoliberal-
ism” was not yet used, but also because much of contemporary art
(notably Conceptual art, Leistung, and land art) had very little
presence in the market, being rather supported by small avant-garde
galleries and, in Frankreich, by some institutions. As witnessed by Christian
Boltanski, whom I quote in my book Le Paradigme de l’art contemporain:
Structures d’une révolution artistique, many artists considered selling art
to be rather shameful in the early 1970s.1 Warhol in this regard was
rather an antimodel.

One generation ago, we probably would not have mentioned
neoliberalism, entweder; eher, we would have talked about the internatio-
nal success of some new artist figures: Hirst, Koons, Murakami, Und
bald. At the end of the 1990s, we were merely at the start of a new
process of spectacular bidding-up of certain types of works in the art
Markt: spectacular, exciting, provocative works (as suggested by the
very title of the Sensation exhibition, launched by the advertising com-
pany Saatchi)2 that immediately appealed to a new generation of quickly
enriched young traders, as well as to new collectors from emerging
Länder (the BRICs).

That is to say, neoliberalism has been only an indirect cause of

this new inflection in contemporary art: by bringing new categories
of amateurs to the art market who have needed to invest large sums of
money but who have not necessarily possessed either a strong cultural
capital or a deep knowledge of the history of modern and contemporary
Kunst, the financialization of the world market has fostered the develop-
ment of a hedonistic, playful, and speculative relationship to art. Das
phenomenon breaks with previous trends in contemporary art, welche
used to be more appreciated by amateurs with high cultural but little
economic capital.

Nathalie Heinich, Le paradigme de l’art contemporain: Structures d’une révolution artistique
(Paris: Gallimard, 2014).
Charles Saatchi, Sensation (exhibition presented at the Royal Academy of Arts, London,
September 18–December 28, 1997).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

H
C

ich

e
H

135

It would therefore be an error to think that neoliberalism brought

about a “commodification” of art: this has always existed, because for
centuries artists have needed to earn their living by putting their pro-
ductions on the market, be it through direct interactions with customers
or through the mediation of an art establishment. What neoliberalism
has indirectly produced is simply the transformation of a certain part of
contemporary art (but not all of this art, Natürlich) into a luxury product,
analogous to the yachts, watches, and overpriced handbags that today
serve as an outward sign of wealth for those who have taken advantage
of the financialization of the economic world.

By the way, no one would mind about this commodification—
schließlich, who minds about the high prices reached by luxury goods?—
if art were not associated in Western culture with values such as beauty,
morality, spirituality, and authenticity that are broadly considered as
incompatible with economic value. It is this antinomy regarding value
that makes one wonder about the link between art and neoliberalism—
a link seen as an enigma to be solved, even though the answer is
obviously that of a more or less strong link according to periods and
to artistic genres. As Marcel Duchamp put it so accurately: “There’s
no solution, because there’s no problem . . .”3

Nathalie Heinich is a senior researcher in sociology at the centre national de la

recherche scientifique in Paris. she is the author of more than forty books, inkl-

ing Le Triple jeu de l’art contemporain (1998), L’Art contemporain exposé aux rejets

(1998), Le Paradigme de l’art contemporain: Structures d’une révolution artistique

(2014), and Harald Szeemann, un cas singulier (2015). her first book (1991) hat

been translated into english as The Glory of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of

Admiration (1996).

Marcel Duchamp, Entretiens avec Pierre Cabanne (Paris: Belfond, 1967), 45.

136

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

martijn KoninGs

University of sydney

The interface of political economy with arts and literature has become
dominated by a particular image—capital’s Grinch-like theft of the
future. Jameson called it “the waning of the utopian idea,”1 and Fisher
referred to it as the “slow cancellation of the future.”2 The image rests
on the tendency to interpret neoliberalism through the specific lens
of “financialization” as a post-1970s phenomenon. According to this
Perspektive, as the Fordist manufacturing economy went into decline
during the 1970s, the liberalization of finance and the growth of debt
created new sources of profits, albeit “fictitious” rather than real ones.3
Such perspectives portray neoliberalism as a capitalism on steroids. Als
those drugs are losing their effectiveness, what initially appeared as an
accelerating movement of unchecked market expansion is now increas-
ingly exposed to the weight of its own contradictions. By such reason-
ing, neoliberal policies are now just trying to keep an economic system
going that has fundamentally run out of steam. The constant creation
of new asset bubbles to further this end is fueling the ongoing concen-
tration of wealth, and with each round of stimulus, more asset inflation
is needed in order to produce a given increase of growth and employ-
ment. Neoliberalism, for all its claims to dynamism and innovation,
has become a bailout society.

This means that a certain basic notion of “postmodernism,” much

in the sense that Harvey outlined some decades ago,4 has never quite
lost its salience as a characterization of how our aesthetic relationship
to neoliberal life is conceived in high culture and intellectual life. Von
this logic, modernism can be seen as an expression of intense discon-
tent with modern life that is accompanied by a renewal of faith in the
possibility of establishing greater control over the direction of human

Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (2004): 36.

1
2 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

(Winchester, Vereinigtes Königreich: Zero Books, 2014), 16.
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
(London: Verso, 1994); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford
Universitätsverlag, 2006).
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

S
G
N

ich

N
Ö
K

137

Geschichte. Postmodernism, by contrast, has no such faith in the possibility
of freeing ourselves from the tangled webs of the past or in our ability
to assert a liberating direction forward. The secular condition that mod-
ernism associated with the potentiality of self-creation now appears as
the impasse of self-referential signification. Whereas at an earlier time the
postmodern condition may still have offered its own creative compensa-
tionen, it has now morphed into the depressive stance of “capitalist real-
ism,”5 the sheer impossibility of imagining a different future.

These terms of debate, even as they seek to establish how exactly
the logic of capital affects our relationship to modernity, never raise
the question of how “modern” our critique of capital really is. The image
of capital that has such critical currency figures it as a “bad infinity,”
in Hegel’s sense,6 an irrational movement that has no end or purpose
other than its self-continuation and self-augmentation. This rehearses
a premodern, religiously driven critique of capital as a movement whose
self-referentiality rivals God’s power over creation and steals the time
that is only God’s to give. The redeployment of that notion in modern
mal, most notably in Marx’s work, is meant to highlight the irrational
element in a putatively modern and rational age. But there is still some-
thing awkward about this repurposing of a premodern critique of capi-
tal—above all, it fails to register how our relationship to capital changes
with the transition to modernity.7

We can go back here to Adam Smith’s work as the founding
moment of modern economics.8 It articulates the reconceptualization
of capital not as a threat to divine order but as a secular source of
order—“capital” becomes “the market.” Key to this shift was the asser-
tion of the market’s institutional neutrality. In earlier times, such a
notion had been unthinkable: even when money and commerce had
been tolerated, they were never above suspicion and were always seen
as inherently dangerous, prone to overstepping their boundaries. Noch
we moderns find such a notion of institutional neutrality intuitive: NEIN
one reading Smith now can fail to appreciate the prima facie plausibility
of his account of the merely “facilitating” role of commerce and trade

5
6

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, Vereinigtes Königreich: Zero Books, 2009).
David Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (London: Profile Books,
2017).
Martijn Konings, Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2018).
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books 1–3 [1776] (London: Penguin, 1999).

138

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

and its beneficial effects. This implies a very significant shift in our
relationship to capital—which appears less and less as a bad infinity
and increasingly as a benevolent universality, a way of organizing soci-
ety that has an indefinite capacity for inclusion—that is, a distinctly
modern form of community.

What occurs here is what Lefort might have referred to as a

moment of foundational occlusion, a constitutive blind spot that occurs
when transcendent legitimations of authority lose their power and secu-
lar subjectivity becomes responsible for re-presenting and symbolizing
itself.9 In its Smithian origins, the gap between “capital” and the “mar-
ket” is almost imperceptible, a crack in a mirror that is only visible
when observed from very specific angles. Yet the consequences could
not be more significant. From Smith’s moment on, the market is the
imaginary of capital, and the problems of the latter are conceptualized
in terms of the corruption of its true form—that is, the corruption of
the market as an innocuous institution that privileges no one in particu-
lar and rewards effort and merit in neutral and impartial ways. Das
is particularly evident in the development of the republican tradition
in the Anglo-American context, which has never abandoned the critique
of capital but looks to the market as a check on corruption, a bulwark
against monarchical concentrations of power.

As neoliberal subjects, we know all too well that the market is the
most potent ideological image of capital. But here we miss the point if,
as progressives are inclined to, we simply attack the tenet of “market
neutrality” as a naïve, blatantly ideological faith in the magic of the mar-
ket. What escapes attention in this way is that the image of the market
expresses a much deeper, affectively and aesthetically charged relation-
ship to capital. Natürlich, the market does not have an image in a visual
sense: it is fully dematerialized, abstract, conceptual. But paradoxically,
this does not diminish, but instead only enhances, its power for modu-
lating our experience of capital.10 Vogl has outlined this effect in terms
of the transfer of the power of theodicy onto the logic of oikodicy: wohingegen
theodicy was the theological endeavor of reconciling the omnipotence
and benevolence of God with the existence of human misfortune, oikod-
icy refers to the logic whereby moderns continuously reinvent a rich

Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).

9
10 Martijn Konings, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Universität in Stanford

Drücken Sie, 2015).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

S
G
N

ich

N
Ö
K

139

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Imagining the Future through the Market, 2015. Photograph

of new york City graffiti. © Martijn Konings.

panoply of rationalizations for why the market has “not yet” delivered
the inclusive and just social order that we expect of it.11

Neoliberal oikodicy has a particular temporal structure: it works

by constantly renewing the promise of a better future by making up
excuses for the past. And this maintains a capitalist logic that turns the
weight of the past into an endless series of provocations, animating a
rationality that has us responding productively to and valorizing capital’s
speculative claims.12 We have yet to see a series of bailouts that does not
subsequently become the rationale for another turn to austerity politics
as a way to restore an orderly market. The capitalist past therefore is not
“dead weight,” merely weighing down our movements and bringing the
flow of history to a halt. Capital has never abandoned its promissory
structure and remains a provocation machine, constantly demanding
a renewal of our orientation to the future by forcing us to come up with
constructive responses to situations not of our own making. It feeds on
the unreflexive element of modernity, the way in which a rationality that
takes itself to be secular and beyond irrational superstition comes to

11
12

Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).
Lisa Adkins, The Time of Money (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

140

artmargins 10:3

revolve around a particular image that never delivers on its promise yet
draws strength from that very failure. A truly modern critique of capital
would need to be able to engage these practical operations of capital.
They are not helpfully engaged by a notion of the stolen future, welche
is best seen as a formal loss of hope that does little to attenuate the
intensity with which we experience capital’s emotional rollercoasters.
Natürlich, it is difficult to think about the very idea of modernity
without in some way emphasizing that it has opened up the future,
that events are henceforth possible rather than scheduled. But this
sensibility has always existed in the tension between radical and more
politically muted forms of Enlightenment thinking. Central to the latter
trend has been the consistent temptation to take the awareness of the
contingency of history as an occasion to assert the possibility of ratio-
nally constructing the human future. Such idealism suppresses our
awareness of the aporias, paradoxes, and blind spots that humanity’s
self-referential production of history implies. Kahn has shown that the
early-modern perspective on poiesis as a secular activity, of which artis-
tic creation was the emblematic expression, was characterized precisely
by such engagement with the paradoxes of secular self-creation.13 What
her story does not interrogate is the role of the rationalization of an
ascendant capitalism in the abandonment of that critical character of
poiesis, a movement that sacrificed the newfound “strength of the sub-
ject” at the altar of the “fallacy of constitutive subjectivity,” in Adorno’s
well-known phrase.14

To identify the promise of modernity with the promise of the
future is to play right into the logic of neoliberal oikodicy. Seen from
this angle, the key achievement of modernity may not be its orientation
toward the future, but rather the possibility of constructing a new rela-
tionship to our past—the effects of which we cannot know until they
appear as the new past that we have made. Natürlich, this is not a par-
ticularly novel point—indeed, few artworks have circulated more in crit-
ical theory circles than Klee’s backward-moving Angelus Novus, owing
to Benjamin’s interpretation of it as an image of progress. But such
insights seem to get lost, perhaps not without fail but certainly far too
often, when we start thinking about economic issues. When the ques-

Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Kontinuum, 1973), xx.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

S
G
N

ich

N
Ö
K

141

tion of capital rears its head, we all too readily turn to a plaintive style of
critique that imagines the future we might have created had it not been
for capital’s constant interference with our plans and its pre-occupation
of the future. The modern project may well turn out to be as irredeem-
able as many say it is, but that is not by itself a good reason for staying
with a premodern, essentially religious critique of capital in the
meantime.

Martijn Konings teaches in the department of Political economy at the University

of sydney. he is the author of The Development of American Finance (2011), Der

Emotional Logic of Capitalism (2015), Capital and Time (2018), and The Asset

Economy (2020, coauthored with lisa adkins and melinda cooper).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

142

artmargins 10:3

leiGh claire la berGe

city University of new york

Is there a more contested word in use today within the English-
language humanities discourses than neoliberalism? What does it mean,
how does it circulate, where does it derive from, and where will it lead?
These questions not only are open for interpretation, but in fact are pro-
ductive of genealogies so disparate as to be almost irreconcilable. An
the one hand, any term with this much use, across so many disciplines,
would encounter similar problems; in that sense, there is nothing
unique about neoliberalism. The terms commodity, capitalism, reading,
abstraction—just to name a few—would (and have) become similarly
capacious. Andererseits, even among those terms, neoliberalism
still stands out. In einem 2017 essay on the saturation of the term’s use in
the humanities, the historian Quinn Slobodian and I anecdotally noted
that of the words in the 135 abstracts submitted to a conference on
“The Contemporary” for early- and mid-career scholars, held at Prince-
ton University in 2016, neoliberalism came second in frequency only
to the general prefix post (postmodern, posthuman, usw.).1 Given that
the conference was not devoted to economic concerns, the incidence
of the term is remarkable. That was four years ago. What has changed
since then, and how can the conversation about the multiple discur-
sive worlds of neoliberalism be made specific to arts discourses and
production?

For a start, we can delineate three main avenues of the term

neoliberalism’s scope and breadth. Erste, the term is routinely used
to periodize a post-Keynesian moment ranging roughly speaking from
the mid-1970s until now. Zweite, neoliberalism denotes a logic of gov-
ernmentality—a way to organize people and populations in accordance
with a modality of a flexible yet reflexive form of state power that relates
to economic management. This second use of the term is, Natürlich,
derived from Foucault’s later works, the time when he read the actual
ordoliberals and neoliberals and sought to tease out a theory of eco-
nomic rationality distinct from Marxian and Smithian conceptions of it.

Leigh Claire La Berge and Quinn Slobodian, “Reading for Neoliberalism, Reading like
Neoliberals,” American Literary History 29, NEIN. 3 (September 2017): 602–14.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

e
G
R
e
B

A
l

143

Endlich, we have the self-defined neoliberals, including F. A. Hayek,
Gary Becker, and Wilhelm Röpke—among others—who conceived
of 20th-century democracy as a threat to capitalism and who sought
to find ways for the nation-state and for international coalitions
(WTO, GATT, usw.) to enshrine and protect certain zones for the flour-
ishing of capitalist transactions. They argued for both a strong state
and a regulated economic sphere.

Art historians, and indeed artists themselves, are most apt to
use the post-Keynesian and Foucauldian approaches to the term.
We live in a neoliberal era and are confronted with neoliberal logic
on a daily basis. Such claims go unremarked in much arts-oriented
Diskurs; In der Tat, they are often assumed. The result of these
theoretical assumptions is that neoliberalism is likely to be treated
thematically and as a matter of content in both the production and
interpretation of art. A social-practice piece that represents economic
inequality might be understood as a “critique of neoliberalism,”
Zum Beispiel, while the loss of governmental arts funding might be
received as an example of “neoliberal policy.” After a decade of criti-
cal theory-oriented books that give broad coverage to neoliberalism
as a period—such as David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliber-
alism—or as a representation of a dominant ideology—for example,
Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution—
this makes sense.2 But does it make for good aesthetic theory?

. . .

I was quite pleased that Pedro Erber and Octavian Esanu asked me to
participate in this roundtable on “Art under Neoliberalism,” since for
years I’ve argued in articles, conference papers, and my recent book
Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially
Engaged Art that, for arts and humanities scholars engaged in interpre-
tive work, neoliberal is the wrong term.3 That situation could change,
but the onus is on scholars in arts disciplines to bring about this
change by moving beyond the tired tropes of entrepreneurialism and
deregulation. The stakes are different in historical disciplines, as won-
derful recent books like Melinda Cooper’s Family Values and Quinn

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, New York: Zone
Books, 2015).
Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially
Engaged Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

144

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

Slobodian’s Globalists have shown.4 These books, along with Nancy
MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s
Stealth Plan for America, trace what neoliberals actually did and how
they imagined themselves doing it. Somewhere between intellectual
history and genealogy, these studies offer a specification of the term
neoliberalism itself, one that will enlarge our conceptual grasp of the
phenomenon as well as help us decide whether we should continue
to endow it with the capacious presence it now has.

Do we have a body of art scholarship that has explored what neo-
liberal art is? I do not believe so, and my answer prompts me to ask a
different question: do we need one? I am thinking of recent works of
Marxist aesthetic theory such Jasper Bernes’s The Work of Art in the Age
of Deindustrialization or Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Bernes makes
little use of the term neoliberalism, and he always uses it as an adjective
rather than a free-standing noun. Bishop doesn’t have much truck with
the term, entweder, nor does Nicholas Brown in his recent Autonomy: Der
Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism.5 These studies are each rigorous
in their own way, as they seek to define the relationship between capital
and culture. What do we make of the fact that none of them offer a real,
conceptual engagement with neoliberalism? Stattdessen, they treat neoliber-
alism not as an atmosphere or a context, but as a philosophy of economic
management and an approach to understanding what in fact constitutes
the economic as such.

. . .

How should those interested in art elaborate, develop, and specify the
term neoliberalism? We cannot be content with an appropriation from
social science or history into art, but rather, we must seek out a concep-
tual translation. Dave Beech has started such a translation process in his
book Art and Value,6 but there is more to be done—and more to be wary
von. In his work on Adorno’s aesthetic criticism, Stewart Martin contends
that “institutional theories of art and the ‘artworld’ . . . have, so far, been

4 Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire
and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
See Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Universitätsverlag, 2017); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of
Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2011); Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art
under Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and
Marxist Economics (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

e
G
R
e
B

A
l

145

developed at a level of generality that fails to register the specificity
of capitalist forms.”7 Martin makes this claim in the context of deploy-
ment of the term commodity in art and aesthetic discourses. But his
criticism is apt to our discussion of the term neoliberalism as well.
Lee Konstantinou recently edited a dossier in Post45 entitled
“The 7 Neoliberal Arts,” which he introduces with the claim that
“neoliberal artists have thus internalized the notion that the artist is
Auch, Notwendig, an entrepreneur or economic player.”8 He specifies
how neoliberal artists function by arguing that they, essentially, have
to create their own publics and interpretive lenses as a result of the
neoliberal imperative to “invest in the self.” He writes: “the boundaries
of their work expand beyond the form of aesthetic objects to the infra-
structures that sustain their work. They do not just make comics but
comic-book companies. They don’t just create video games but game stu-
dios. They are makers not only of aesthetic forms—but of aesthetic
fields.”9 This may be true of contemporary artists, but surely it is not
the differentia specifica in relationship to 20th-century arts production
and history. We are still waiting for that context and specification to
be developed as it relates to neoliberalism.

Leigh Claire La Berge teaches at the city University of new york. she is the

author of Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (2014)

and Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially

Engaged Art (2019).

Stewart Martin, “The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute Commodity,” Radical
Philosophy 146 (November–December 2007): 15–25, 21.
Lee Konstantinou, “The 7 Neoliberal Arts, oder: Art in the Age of Mass High Culture,” Post45
(August 21, 2020), http://post45.org/2020/08/the-7-neoliberal-arts-or-art-in-the-age-of
-mass-high-culture/.
Ebenda.

146

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

Geert lovinK

institute of network cultures, amsterdam

“To think always means to think critically.

And to think critically is always to be hostile.”

—Hannah Arendt

EU president Ursula von der Leyen wants Europe to tap its inner avant-
garde to make its thousands of cultural heritage cities more sustain-
able.1 In her inaugural State of the Union speech on September 16,
2020, von der Leyen pledged to revive the historical Bauhaus, founded
a century ago in Dessau, Deutschland, in order to get there. The European
Union sees a chance to create a new common urban aesthetic born out
of a need to renovate and construct more energy-efficient buildings. "ICH
want NextGenerationEU to kickstart a European renovation wave and
make our Union a leader in the circular economy.”2 For von der Leyen,
this is not just an environmental or economic project:

It needs to be a new cultural project for Europe. Every movement
has its own look and feel. And we need to give our systemic change
its own distinct aesthetic—to match style with sustainability. Das
is why we will set up a new European Bauhaus—a co-creation
space where architects, artists, students, engineers, designers work
together to make that happen. This is shaping the world we want
to live in. A world served by an economy that cuts emissions,
boosts competitiveness, reduces energy poverty, creates rewarding
jobs and improves quality of life. A world where we use digital tech-
nologies to build a healthier, greener society.3

Putting rhetoric aside, this is the first time the European Commission
has proposed to set up what could potentially become its first art school.
The European University Institute in Florence, founded in 1972, exclu-
sively focuses on postgraduate teaching and research in the social sci-
zen, excluding the arts and humanities. There are many EU-affiliated

1
2

For up-to-date information, please visit https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/index_en.
Ursula von der Leyen, “Building the World We Want to Live In: A Union of Vitality in
a World of Fragility,” State of the Union speech delivered to the European Commission,
last modified September 16, 2020, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail
/en/SPEECH_20_1655.
Ebenda.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

K
N

ich

v
Ö
l

147

research centers, but none of them come even close to art education.
So far, Brussels left the arts to the member states. Jetzt, whether future
architects, urban planners, software designers, and circular-economy
experts need an experimental “green-deal art school” may be something
that needs to be discussed further. Jedoch, what’s remarkable about
von der Leyen’s proposal is that it goes truly beyond existing EU research
policy instruments, such as Horizon Europe or Creative Europe.

Coming from a deeply federated Germany, where culture and educa-

tion are considered strictly a matter of the Länder (Staaten), the European
Bauhaus idea could, in theory, be reworked and turned into a bold blue-
print. Von der Leyen implies that Europeans should come up with a new
institutional form that can steer through the ecological and digital chal-
Längen. Even for the European Commission, it is a given fact that existing
art academies, design schools, technical universities, and humanities
departments cannot be expected to come up with such a transdisciplinary
school concept. For many, it was already clear before von der Leyen’s
speech that we are in need of new beginnings after Covid-19. How can art
education become more relevant? And how can it cease to produce pre-
carious artists, Kuratoren, and critics while squandering their energy to
serve outdated formats and ideals of autonomy? The arts can do better
than merely acting as a motor for the gentrification of creative “smart cit-
ies” and “collaborative” work spaces in which the real gain is further seg-
regation. Agreed, the arts can play a major role in “societal challenges,”
but as a problem accelerator—not merely as part of a PR and marketing
campaign. Our Bauhaus can do without aesthetic solutionism.

We also know that these new insights have not taken away the mys-
tique of the historical Bauhaus. The critiques that a century ago the school
wasn’t green, that it excluded women, and failed to make postcolonial state-
ments are ultimately justified, but are also a bit too easy. What’s important
is the difference that such initiatives can make today. What if we were able
to get such a hybrid school off the ground, with a young and visionary staff
from across Europe and beyond? To face the stack of crises, we should learn
to zoom out, bring in difference, question authority, work on hard problems,
avoid consensus at all cost, embrace the weird, and remain paranoid.
The paradoxes of modern “dark ecology” (as described by Tim Morton)
will be only one of the many courses offered at the school.4 What will stu-
dents make of the Extinction Vorlehre, including a collapsology course?

Tim Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University
Drücken Sie, 2016).

148

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

We urgently need to re-create the world. In line with the pioneers
a century ago, the Bauhaus 2.0 will need to stop building and instead
create architectures (as the saying went back then). Diesmal, the task
will be to dream up federated networks, inclusive code, and a public
digital sphere aimed at supporting free cooperation, radical care, Und
mutual aid between a multitude of players. The real challenge for an
innovative Bauhaus network will be to face Silicon Valley and the venture-
capital “startup” rhetoric and unmask this entrepreneurial model as
a major obstacle to change. The centralized (digital) platform model
needs to be questioned. The aim of a 21st-century Bauhaus cannot be
to create a handful of European billionaires.

We should embrace a design aesthetic that is always already self-
reflective. To mention only one of many possible sources of inspiration,
we could go back to the Swedish Digital Bauhaus Manifesto, written by
Pelle Ehn back in 1998.5 Mixtures of art, Wissenschaft, Ausbildung, and public
policy can hardly be called “German.” Quite the opposite. “This is the
Europeanization of a German development model,” said Welch Guerra
in Politico.6 And lest we forget: the staff of Bauhaus 1.0 was hardly Ger-
man. The cosmopolitan gang had to flee the Nazis and found themselves
exiled across the world.

The deconstruction of the Bauhaus 1.0 ethic and aesthetic should
remain an important background for any project that proclaims itself
a new Bauhaus. The critique of modernism has been the task of the
critical postwar 1968 Generation. We can read entire libraries about
the totalitarian reality of the concrete urban deserts designed by Le Cor-
busier’s clones (or travel to China ourselves). Mittlerweile, we know whom
the Bauhaus movement excluded, and why. We also know the underly-
ing philosophical logic that made it so easy to adopt these arguments
from the same forces that had needed the exclusions in the first place.
Most importantly, we should never forget why the Bauhaus failed to
become the truly democratic artistic force it had set out to be. Jedoch,
the fact that Bauhaus 1.0 was “inherently not inclusive,” as an open let-
ter from the Maastricht Jan van Eyck Academie claims,7 should not stop

Pelle Ehn, “Manifesto for a Digital Bauhaus,” Digital Creativity 9, NEIN. 4 (1998): 207–17,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14626269808567128.
Joshua Posaner, “Von der Leyen’s Green Bauhaus Dream,” Politico, last modified October 6,
2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/bauhaus-von-der-leyen-green-recycle/.
“Objections to the Term New European Bauhaus: A Letter Addressed to the President
and Vice President of the European Commission” (open letter, Jan van Eyck Academie),
last modified November 6, 2020, https://janvaneyck.info/news/call-for-action-objections
-to-the-term-new-european-bauhaus.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

K
N

ich

v
Ö
l

149

us. We need to understand the political momentum currently providing
a context of urgency to found a network of experimental interdisciplin-
ary “green-deal” art schools, leaving room open for collective mourning.
We live in the midst of the COVID pandemic and the greatest economic
recession since the 1930s, schließlich.

What happens when we start with Tim Morton’s “dark ecology,”
instead of rushing into the ruthless promotion of “positive energy” that
“creative designers” are supposed to express?8 Criticality is something
Europe should claim and be proud of. It is productive force that invites
us to reflect and bring in other voices.9 The emphasis on solutions runs
away from very real conflicts in society that need to be faced before we
can start to implement blueprints. Ecological solutionism hides the
choices that need to be made and smoothes conflicting interests—
turning conflicts into “challenges” and “wicked problems” that can be
resolved through better branding and marketing. The network of “rain-
bow houses” can do a better job.

Bauhaus 1.0 emerged from a crisis-ridden Europe similar to ours.

It created a new engineering style for the world from an economic, tech-
nical, sozial, and artistic point of view. It understood the need for a new
form of education, especially against the intrusion of authoritarian polit-
ical movements. Its staff had to confront, as do we, a traditionalist, con-
servative establishment born from the values of “old Europe.” A century
später, the touristic and academic city of Weimar still gives us that vibe.
This is the courage we wish to have as we dream of an art-and-design
education that dares to ask fundamental questions and dares to make
a difference.

Geert Lovink is a dutch media theorist, internet critic, and founder of the institute

of network cultures at the amsterdam University of applied sciences. he is the

author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession

(2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks without a Cause (2012), Social Media

Abyss (2016), and Sad by Design (2019).

René Kemp and Joost van Haaften, “Building Back a Better World: A Plea for a Bauhaus
Initiative” (working paper, United Nations University–Maastricht Economic and Social
Research Institute on Innovation and Technology), last modified October 20, 2020, https://
www.merit.unu.edu/building-back-a-better-world-a-plea-for-a-bauhaus-initiative/.
See Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink, Made in China, Designed in California, Criticised in
Europa: Design Manifesto (Amsterdam: BIS, 2020).

150

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

iGnacio m. sánchez Prado

washington University in st. louis

In 2017, Gabriel Orozco captured the headlines of the Mexican cultural
world with his installation/exhibit Oroxxo. Oroxxo established a fully
functioning Oxxo convenience store inside the kurimanzutto gallery in
Mexico City. Oxxo and kurimanzutto are both peak products of Mexican
neoliberalism.1 The main concept of the installation was the merger of
the retail and art economies. In Oroxxo, regular consumer items (bottles
of soda and water, snacks, candy, detergent, usw.) were sold, but a system
of stickers branded them as works of art. The catalog provides entries for
the items very much as a museum would, adding also the material and
numbering of the stickers: “013. Chocolate Hershey’s Cookies & Cream,
barra 41, Vynil, GO12869.”2 The graphic geometric stamps that inter-
vened the brand logos in the products and turned them into works of art
only came to be at the moment the pieces were purchased, and only a
certain number of items within the store were available for this scheme.
For the duration of the installation (from February 8 to March 16), vari-
ous pricing and inventory modifications were enacted, in response to
supply and demand, speculation, and other consumer behaviors.

Oroxxo provides a good example of what I call the “social organicity

of neoliberal art.” Debates about art under neoliberalism tend to point
to the same tension. One side of this tension is embodied in the expec-
tation that the work of art, and the field of cultural production at large,
is somehow autonomous from the economic production of value and
the function of objects as commodities. Versions of this expectation run
from Bourdieusian approaches, assuming the relative autonomy of the
cultural field and the production of symbolic capital, to the inherent or
negative autonomy of the artwork due to some form of reflexive element
within its form, as has recently been theorized by Nicholas Brown in the
wake of Adorno.3 On the other side, various theorists have emphasized
the subsumption of art institutions and production to structures of flexi-

2
3

For the record and catalog of the piece, see Gabriel Orozco, Oroxxo (London: Koenig Books,
2018).
Ebenda., 323.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Hrsg. Randal
Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: Der
Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

Ö
D
A
R
P

z
e
H
C
N
á
S

151

ble and decommodified labor that run parallel to neoliberal constructs
such as the creative class or the gig economy. This is evident in the work
of scholars like Sarah Brouillette and Leigh Claire La Berge.4

In my view, the indecision and indistinction between autonomy
and subsumption, between symbolic and economic capital, is the key
and distinctive feature of neoliberalism as culture. Neoliberalism func-
tions on the basis of a profound culturization of the economy that has
intensified as a process of flexible subjectification across the social
spectrum. These processes are visible from the internalization of its
Werte (entrepreneurship, zum Beispiel) even in the baroque economies
at the intersection of informality and globalization—a topic admirably
studied by Verónica Gago—and the thorough integration of the “work
of culture,” as Arlene Dávila terms it, in the imaginaries of development
and social mobility.5

Oroxxo is, in its deliberate obviousness, about the subjective imbri-

cations of art and the precaritized economy of neoliberalism. This works
in part through the identification of the gallery with the convenience
store. Oxxo, the dominant brand in the country, in the model of such
US chains as 7 Eleven and Circle K, is owned by Femsa, a corporate
behemoth invested in the manufacturing and production of Coca-Cola
Produkte, beer, and other beverages. Kurimanzutto began as an itinerant
art gallery in 1999 and settled in a space in the San Miguel Chapultepec
neighborhood in 2008. The entities are both organic products of neo-
liberalism: a corporation that rides on deregulation, labor casualization,
and the monopolistic cooptation of geographies of retail, and a gallery
frequently engaged in the visibilization of the economic notion of art.
It is worth remembering that kurimanzutto’s first event, Economía de
mercado, consisted of the opening of an art-selling stall in a major food
market in Mexico City.

The many works that render visible the relationship between

commerce and art—Orozco’s installation, Banksy’s Exit through the
Gift Shop, Pablo Helguera’s Librería Donceles—coexist with schemes of
financialization that more radically place the artwork into the category

Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2014); Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of
Socially Engaged Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies, trans.
Liz Mason-Deese (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Arlene Dávila, Culture
Funktioniert: Space, Value and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas (New York: New York
Universitätsverlag, 2012).

152

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

of the asset. One can recall here efforts to re-capitalize art—like
The Art Market 2.0 or Maecenas—that advocate financial instrumental-
izations such as the creation of credit markets backed by artworks,
blockchain forms of art ownership and exchange, and the purchase
of fractional interests in works of art.6 These phenomena cannot be
accounted for, meiner Meinung nach, solely by focusing on the idea of intensifica-
tion. Eher, the idea of “neoliberalism” speaks to the ways in which
the social functions of art and its circulation are thoroughly imbricated
in the configuration of the social and the economic in itself, as part of
a large and complex network of cognitive and cultural elements that are
no longer superstructural but have become fully infrastructural. In diesem
network resides the social organicity of neoliberal art.

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado teaches in the latin american studies Program and the

department of romance languages and literatures at washington University, st.

louis. his most recent book in english is Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican

Literatur, the Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (2018).

6 MacDonald-Korth, Duncan, Vili Lehdonvirta, and Eric T. Meyer. The Art Market 2.0:

Blockchain and Financialisation in Visual Arts (London: Alan Turing Institute, 2018). Siehe auch
the website www.maecenas.co.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

Ö
D
A
R
P

z
e
H
C
N
á
S

153

willy thayer

Universidad metropolitana de ciencias
de la educación (Umce), santiago, chile

Several of the essays in Escuelas de arte, campo universitario y for-
mación artística (Art Schools, the University Field, and Artistic Training,
2015),1 an anthology edited by Carolina Herrera and Nelly Richard,
suggest that, in Chile, the art/neoliberalism relationship refers back
to the neo liberalism/university relationship: “the idea that the Chilean
visual arts scene constitutes a field configured by academic institu-
tionality has become a common position. Critics, artists, and histori-
ans have insisted that the development, Übertragung, and conditions
for registering art and artists in the country, are all subordinate to the
blueprint devised by the university institutions that train visual art-
ists. . . . The Cuban critic and curator, Gerardo Mosquera . . . main-
tains an analogous assessment: ‘The Chilean taste for erudite dis –
course . . . must be related to the weight placed on the teaching of art
in the country. . . . The vast majority of artists possess a university
diploma in their specialty. The various universities have their own
traditions and tendencies, and the artists are basically classified
according to university and graduation year. . . . Many have asked
themselves if the history of local art might not simply be the history
of the academy.’ ”2 In the same vein, the art theorist Carlos Pérez
Villalobos notes: “Art degree programs (a limited labor market of art-
ists and intellectuals that emerged from them) promise their users
they will invest them with knowledge of art and make them believe
that art is a productive practice, passing over how art—the ceremony
of art that, in modernity, was a prestigious trigger for experience
(a reflexive elaboration of suffering)—is today all that occurs within
art programs.”3 Carolina Herrera, coeditor of the anthology, hoch-

Carolina Herrera and Nelly Richard, Escuelas de arte, campo universitario y formación
artística (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Departamento de Artes Visuales, Facultad de
Artes, University of Chile, 2015).
Claudio Guerrero and Kaliuska Santibáñez, “Academias, museos y salones: El proyecto
institucional del arte moderno en Chile (1797–1947),” in Carolina Águila and Nelly Richard,
Escuelas de arte, campo universitario y formación artística, Ediciones Departamento de
Artes Visuales, Facultad de Artes, University of Chile, 2015, Santiago, 29–30.
Carlos Pérez Villalobos, “Chilean Art Now,” in Carolina Aguila and Nelly Richard,
Escuelas de arte, campo universitario y formación artística, Ediciones Departamento
de Artes Visuales, Facultad de Artes, University of Chile, 2015, Santiago, P. 67.

154

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

lights that there “have come to exist 16 oder 18 art schools that
offer a Bachelor’s degree in art in 2011. . . . Our artists have an
academic origin.”4

It was not the university vanguard of 1968, nor that of
Allende’s “education for all” (1970–73), nor even the artistic avant-
garde (1956–73) or the neo-avant-garde (1976–83) who effected the
transition from engaged art and critical modernism to art as com-
mercial university dispositif, in the sense recently suggested. Eher,
it is not excessive to insist that the dictatorship (1973–89) changed
both art and the university to effect this transit, this transition5 from
engaged vanguard and trans-textual modernism to a culture of aca-
demic historicism, competition between university galleries and
exhibition spaces, and the exchange and academic indexing of art
as curriculum. The dictatorship also changed the pension system,
the health system, the parliament, and the constitution, subordinat-
ing everything to the financier and business classes (empresariado finan-
ciero). The government of this period even subordinated the spoils
and institutionality of sovereignty to the spoils and institutionality
of the commercial classes. And following the neoliberal interface, Kunst,
the university, democracy, der Staat, and the National Congress were
not alone in their mutation. Even the mountains and the sky were
transformed (mutaron).

In the Chilean neoliberal interface, it is not so much that art,
the university, pensions, und so weiter, are financed by capital coming
from diverse sectors; eher, a sectorless financial capital subsumes
to its rentability whichever sector has met the conditions of being
made profitable. Among these sectors are both the university and
Kunst. Financial profitability constitutes the mission and the principle
of excellence for any given sector within this interface, in such a way
that what is excellent is that which offers the highest return at the

Carolina Herrera, “Encuentros de escuelas de arte o una plataforma en construcción;
in Carolina Aguila and Nelly Richard, Escuelas de arte, campo universitario y formación
artística, Ediciones Departamento de Artes Visuales, Facultad de Artes, Universität
Chile, 2015, Santiago. P. 21. The original statement reads “llega a contar con 16 Ö 18
escuelas de arte que concluyen en una Licenciatura en la especialidad al año 2011. . . .
Nuestros artistas tienen un origen académico.”
See Willy Thayer, La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna (Santiago de Chile:
Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1996); Willy Thayer, “El Golpe como consumación de la van-
guardia” (2003) and “Critica, nihilismo, interrupción: El porvenir de la Avanzada
después de Márgenes e Instituciones” (2005), both collected in El fragmento repetido:
Escritos en estado de excepción (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones/Metales Pesados, 2006).

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

R
e
j
A
H
T

155

lowest cost. Any sector, any collective and multispatial determina-
tion of art within the heteronomy of financial rentability, is planned
out as the use value of profitability’s value. Wenn, under liberalism, zu mit-
sumer good presupposes certain qualities, under neoliberalism, Die
commodity is consumption without a good, or consumption of the
consumer good as consumption of the potential to generate further
financial profit . . .

The hypothesis of the dictatorship as neoliberal transition, oder
the coup as the neoliberal realization of the avant-garde, operates
against the grain of any reading that would see in modernist trans-
texts or those of the Chilean “neo-avant-garde” of the 1970s and 80s
a specific agent of the “change” in art. The modernist writings of the
70s/80s always worked against change, as a counter-closure opposed
to sovereign-dictatorial and neoliberal financial modernization. Der
fact that these modernist circles thematically incorporated into their
artistic medium, into their toolkit, recently arrived and arriving tech-
nologies—technologies proper to the hegemonic structure upon
which neoliberal modernization was intentionally staged and carried
out—tends to be confused with a modernization of their writings.
But neo-avant-garde modernism (under any name) never modern-
izes. It profanes, it defrauds modernization’s frameworks, thematiz-
ing its mise-en-scène and its horizon. Modernism does not change,
does not modernize, does not progress—it mutates. And mutation is
not change, nor is it action, much less advancement or progress.

The modernization of the dispositif of art in Chile, the eighteen
art schools of which Carolina Herrera speaks—these are neither the
effect nor the product of Dittborn’s Pintura aeropostal, nor of Lotty
Rosenfeld’s No +, nor of Leppe’s Gallinas. The neo-avant-garde did
not inspire these curricula, nor did it drive the conditions for the aca-
demization of art, artwork, and artist. To consider the deconstructive
pragmatics of modernism in the 1970s and 80s, the inspiration for
the programs and bibliographies of these art schools aestheticizes
these structurally his toricist schools by using modernist analogies.
If the neo-avant-garde happens to be incorporated to the materials
and bibliographies of many of these schools, if monographs are
written about artists from the neo-avant-garde or about the Escena
de Avanzada, the gesture of these works is far more historicist than
modernist. Their programs, im Gegenzug, are far more historicist than
neo-avant-gardist.

156

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

artmargins 10:3

The neo-avant-garde of the 1970s and 80s did not write in order

to bring about change, advancement, or progress. Their work was
not written, if it was written, “in order to.” They withdrew from tele-
ology, as well as from the strong position pulsing behind the com-
mon question “from where?,” understood as: from which class, Wettrennen,
Geschlecht, country, Spezies, do you speak or write? They wrote neither
from nor for. Stammering, they wrote, in each case, a body, a lan-
Spur, a minor Geschlecht.

I have suggested that modernism does not change, progress,

Vorauszahlung, or revolutionize. Stattdessen, it constitutes the pause par excel-
lence, the absolute pause of modernization. This pause does not belong
to the multitude of rests, stops, and inactions that, combined with the
droves of occupations, engagements, diligences, inter ventions, Und
realizations, create action and sustain it with their rhythms, in a way
that is analogous to how the punctuation or notation of a text, a musi-
cal score, or a script animates and supports the efficacy of the artwork’s
Akt, its execution. The modernist pause does not belong to the proces-
sion of lulls, respites, and delays that feed off the phenomenology of
action—and its associated categories of work, production, intentional-
ität, capitalization, progress, advanced groups. Eher, it is the pause of
that action’s horizon, in the plasticity of its stoppages and activisms.
A proper, or more proper, name for this pause would be muta-
tion. Mutation constitutes the pause of action and of the categories
that constellate the action in their rests and rhythms. If action pre-
supposes intentionality, teleology, Akt, an interest that conditions and
holds together a movement occupied and preoccupied with things
(pragmata), then mutation, whose only possible event is that of the
continual variation of nature,6 constitutes the nonbeing of the pure het-
erology that becomes without arriving at anything, nor at anything’s
beginning, because it does not set out from any particular thing.
Mutation performs the absolute pause7 of the horizon of action, von
Der Akt, of being. Nothing can act where the only event is that of vari-
ation, the open wound of becoming that does not act, does not arrive
at declarations, borders, edges.

6
7

Cf. Deleuze, Le bergsonisme, PUF, 1966, 32; Différence et répétition, PUF, 1968, 306.
“Absoluto no significa incondicionado . . . sino multiplicidad como corporeidad sin límites”
[“Absolute does not mean unconditioned . . . rather a multiplicity as corporeality without
limits”]: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mil Mesetas, Pre-textos, 1994, Valencia, P. 111.

D
Ö
w
N
Ö
A
D
e
D

F
R
Ö
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
ich
R
e
C
T
.

ich
T
.

e
D
u
A
R
T

M
A
R
T
ich
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
0
3
1
2
6
2
0
3
4
9
8
6
A
R
T

M
_
A
_
0
0
3
0
3
P
D

B
j
G
u
e
S
T

Ö
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

M
S

ich

l
A
R
e
B

ich

l
Ö
e
N

R
e
D
N
U

T
R
A

R
e
j
A
H
T

157

The neo-avant-garde, Dann, changed nothing. Nor did it intend
to change anything. It stammered a mutation as it created its future
Vergangenheit, its retrospective posthumousness, against the grain of the dic-
tatorship, of neoliberal modernization. And writing, a mutation, Ist
not an action. Less a scouting party than a pack, it is a multiplicity in
which each singularity brings about a becoming.