Quote of the day, yay!
"Whatever the future of alienated creativity and the city may be ... art and artists symbolically and structurally register the tensions between economic realities and corporate-governmental fictions of the post-Fordist city everywhere.
The artist has become both aider and objector to regeneration, but also the ultimate capitalist subject, what Agamben calls the 'whatever being'. Good for everything and nothing, s/he is without authentic identity - the figure of human 'species-being' freed from specialisation, social obligation and physical work, but in distorted form under alienated labour's continuation along flexibilised lines.
It is perhaps for this reason too that artists have become such paradigmatic figures within late capitalism, attracting fictitious fantasies of production whilst also finding it hard to know how to act within such a treacherous climate of cooptation.
Neither able to successfully collude due to art's lingering requirement for autonomy, nor to effectively opt out (street art becomes gallery art becomes street art etc.), the artist working in the maelstrom of regeneration registers, either critically or not, the social war it entails."
-- Josephine Berry Slater & Anthony Iles, No Room To Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City, Mute Books 2010 (p.52)
The artist has become both aider and objector to regeneration, but also the ultimate capitalist subject, what Agamben calls the 'whatever being'. Good for everything and nothing, s/he is without authentic identity - the figure of human 'species-being' freed from specialisation, social obligation and physical work, but in distorted form under alienated labour's continuation along flexibilised lines.
It is perhaps for this reason too that artists have become such paradigmatic figures within late capitalism, attracting fictitious fantasies of production whilst also finding it hard to know how to act within such a treacherous climate of cooptation.
Neither able to successfully collude due to art's lingering requirement for autonomy, nor to effectively opt out (street art becomes gallery art becomes street art etc.), the artist working in the maelstrom of regeneration registers, either critically or not, the social war it entails."
-- Josephine Berry Slater & Anthony Iles, No Room To Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City, Mute Books 2010 (p.52)
posted by Nor at 19:25
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