Οι χρήσεις της αρετής, ο συμβολικός θάνατος του καλλιτέχνη κ.α.

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/68

Ενδιαφέρον άρθρο που εξετάζει το ζήτημα του ήθους (του καλλιτέχνη, του διανοούμενου αλλά και του πολιτικού και όσων συμμετέχουν στο μιντιακό χρηματιστήριο της διασημότητας) από την σκοπιά του design.
Έτσι για να αναρωτηθούμε για τις συστημικές χρήσεις της αρετής ή της έλλειψής της.


Μικρό απόσπασμα:

In our days, the romantic image of the poète maudit is substituted by that of the artist being explicitly cynical—greedy, manipulative, business-oriented, seeking only material profit, and implementing art as a machine for deceiving the audience. We have learned this strategy of calculated self-denunciation—of self-denunciatory self-design—from the examples of Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. However old, this strategy has rarely missed its mark. Looking at the public image of these artists we tend to think, “Oh, how awful,” but at the same time, “Oh, how true.” Self-design as self-denunciation still functions in a time when the avant-garde zero-design of honesty fails. Here, in fact, contemporary art exposes how our entire celebrity culture works: through calculated disclosures and self-disclosures. Celebrities (politicians included) are presented to the contemporary audience as designed surfaces, to which the public responds with suspicion and conspiracy theories. Thus, to make the politicians look trustworthy, one must create a moment of disclosure—a chance to peer though the surface to say, “Oh, this politician is as bad as I always supposed him or her to be.” With this disclosure, trust in the system is restored through a ritual of symbolic sacrifice and self-sacrifice, stabilizing the celebrity system by confirming the suspicion to which it is necessarily already subjected.



photo: Serenity (snapshot from the movie)