Category Archives: Regular Mondays

2016.11.15 : generative self-valorizing systems (the audacity of money)

Yesterday evening, in my graphic design class, we started talking about conceptual art. Our goal was to understand generative systems; systems that operate not as a complete, static organization of elements and/or information, but a set of rules that govern the organization of elements and/or information, allowing for variation, but also consistency.

Nevertheless, we approached the question with examples from Sol LeWitt, who is known for his labor intensive conceptual art instillations. (Labor intensive, that is, for persons other than himself.) One of my classmates, who works as an illustrator, expressed her frustration and irritation with the popularity and financial success of conceptual artists. It seems unfair to her that she should expend the effort she does to achieve a high level technical and aesthetic achievement, and make no money, while these people or persons can write up instructions and take up rooms and wings of museums.

I derailed the conversation by bringing up Damien Hirst. My opinion is split on him; I think he’s a money-grubbing, pretentious, no-talent dick, but I’ve also been greatly moved by at least one of his pieces.

In the course of distraction, I came upon a sudden realization.

The relationship between banking and art is generally recognized. I recommend this piece from The Believer, December, 2012, I believe it is the one that first introduced me Damien Hirst’s famous diamond encrusted skull.

Currently, conceptual art is all the rage. I don’t think this is a mere side-effect of post-modernism. We have not exited the aesthetic age, and entered one dominated by the theoretical, nor is this a world of plastic ideas. The reason for the popularity of conceptual art lies with bankers.

We live in the age of finance capitalism. I have a penchant for Italian Marxists (Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato) whom I fully recognize are far enough out in left field to border on the incomprehensible. (Though I believe that their analyses and concerns are more discerning than most.)

Finance capitalism is defined by perpetual valorization of non-material capital. The financial machine of the stock market, the one that invented the nihilistic derivative assets that blew a hole in the global economy, the one that consistently over-values enterprises with no clear means of profit production (Uber, Twitter, et. al.), is, literally, a market of ideas.

They pour money into blackholes with everyone else’s money, and somehow transform that money into more money, until, suddenly, the bottom falls out from underneath them. (Then the money comes out of the real labor and real capital production and real earning power of the general populace, who run the rat race everyday to feed their families––no diamond encrusted skulls to be found.)

Of course finance capitalism spends its unspendable quantities of money on art that jumps, fully formed, from the head of the artist. The technical and physical labor that goes into the works are not the sources of value, and not the ones who will see the true profit. The money will go to the man with the gall to think he can sell such a thing to someone, and the children dying in the wars in Africa to bring us the diamonds and the gold and the shiny pieces that keep our entire immaterial infrastructures alive and beeping will see only hunger and death.

The bankers know how the system really works––you don’t pay the farmer or the miner or the paint mixer.

You pay only the broker.

deselinord-photo:

Working hard, hardly working.
RISD CE, Graphic Structures + Systems.

12 November, 2016.

2016.11.11 : the politics of multiplicity, a personal history.

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It seems like the entire country is arguing about who is at fault for the recent election results. Who is more disconnected from America? Who is more self-righteous? Who understands the country least?

Meanwhile, I have been struggling to understand how ethnic or religious discriminatory rhetoric works. My go-to example has been the bankers. Why hate the bankers because “they’re Jewish” when you can hate them because they nearly destroyed the global economy? The first seems like a pathetic comparison to the latter. The latter cannot be denied and, more importantly, actively impacted every single person in this country in a negative fashion.

I have long known that my experiences growing up where markedly different than the “average” American experience, or, more correctly phrased, the “average” experience of any “native national” citizen.

I always begin with my elementary school education, but it begins before that; I grew up speaking two languages at home, Greek and English. And spent summers in a foreign country––one I nevertheless called “home”––amongst people who seemed to find me to be unheimlich, the familiar-strange. I did and didn’t speak like them, and looked and didn’t look like them, missing all the the wrong things to be the same, and all the right ones to be truly foreign.

Then my parents sent me to a French-American school, where not only did I learn another language, but we began to learn how to be French. The French education system is a marvel, a perfectly calibrated colonial machine that can destroy borders and turn even native-born American citizens into tiny French nationalists.

More importantly, of all the children in my class only two had parents who spoke only English, and of the “white” children, most came from families that would not be considered “American”. We were not diverse in racial distribution, but by age 8, I knew knew families hailing from more than one part of the Middle East, from a variety of places in north and west Africa, a Jewish family, a lesbian household, interracial parents, Muslim families, and any number of hyphenated Americans, and people who spoke more than English at home.

I was floored when a friend told me he didn’t meet a Black person until after he finished elementary school.

When I attempt to imagine getting to 18 without meeting someone Jewish, or Black, or bilingual, I am literally incapable of generating a workable facsimile of that experience. Never mind, living an entire lifetime like that.

It seems stupid to say it, but just as there are people who have no framework for what a Jewish person is, or says, or does, besides what they see on TV or hear in church, I have no framework for having never met a Jewish person. My life is sheltered and devoid of much conflict and difficulty, but it has always been replete with individual variety.

Growing up, my blond haired, blue eyed, male, English speaking, American best friend was the oddity. And I learned to get past it. Sure, it was odd that his parents couldn’t help him with his homework, and that they didn’t come from somewhere else, but people still learned to confuse us for siblings.

I’ve always lived in the melting pot of America. I don’t know how to live somewhere else.