| Today we face a functional cultural industry whose substance is widely corrupted by greed of gain. The immense budgets film and music productions, and their interconnection with merchandising such as computer games and coffee cups, and media presence can hardly be opposed by freelance artists working on their own. I suggest that the advertising industry creates aesthetic and cultural realities (ideas of man) far more effectively than any artistic action might. In the future, I see the culture industry become even more fundamentally superior to the museum relics—through creative reinvention of man himself for the sake of excess value via genetic engineering or the coupling of neuronal networks with virtual reality. |  |
Peter Feiler
Today we face a functional cultural industry whose substance is widely corrupted by greed of gain. The immense budgets film and music productions, and their interconnection with merchandising such as computer games and coffee cups, and media presence can hardly be opposed by freelance artists working on their own.
I suggest that the advertising industry creates aesthetic and cultural realities (ideas of man) far more effectively than any artistic action might. In the future, I see the culture industry become even more fundamentally superior to the museum relics—through creative reinvention of man himself for the sake of excess value via genetic engineering or the coupling of neuronal networks with virtual reality. It could be argued that, in contrast to profane products, art was free of function. Yet this I call idealistic window dressing: you can save taxes with art, gain prestige, prove good taste, or succumb to the fetish of possession that is collecting. Buying things free of function might even be interpreted as the vain appearance of cynical decadence. The museum visit is at times equal to a purchased memory of better, or optionally worse, times. But do we want the absolute market? Do we want it, if necessary, more radical and unconditional than we could possibly imagine? What drives me is horror, fear, and helplessness.
To what magic moments of morality modern art can arise in our brave new world was laid out for me by a certain Boris Groys’ art theoretical bouquet of crap. The author seriously compares the excesses of Abu Ghraib to an art performance. He takes the West’s freedom-fighting post-heroic lack of dignity displayed there as a potent means in the symbolic trade-off with the terrorists’ martyrdom.
The “easy-going” post-heroic dealing with crisis is a smug stylization to me, and a declaration of bankruptcy of an allegedly complex world where common sense faces deprivation of its natural right to make up its own mind. On, for example, the fact that the system of interest resembles slavery, or that three giant steel structures cannot be dismantled expertly by two planes. The self-humiliation and debasement in modern art as Groys so positively describes, much rather appear to me—not excluding myself—like psychological compensation for our own powerlessness.
