Contemporary Art Impoverishment: Overproduction/Overdestruction

AESTHETIC IMPOVERISHMENT IS DUE TO OVERPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY ART
AND
OVERDESTRUCTION OF THE SOCIAL TISSUE IS DUE TO THE WARS ON TERRORISM AND DRUG CARTELS
OVERPRODUCTION AND OVERDESTRUCTION HAVE THE PURPOSE OF IMPLEMENTING
MORE MEASURES TO ASSURE THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH AND POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE PRIVILEGED FEW

The contemporary art system plays itself up as a neutral and positive cultural integration tool, however, by abusing concepts like “inclusion,” “the lesser of evils” or “freedom of expression” it has become delirious and has impoverished itself.

The contemporary Artworld reeks of intellectual and poetic poverty as its repertoire of formal variations is exhausted. Contemporary Art has bankrupted “art” in its never ending need, especially since 9/11, to rationalize and aestheticize the fears and anxieties fueled by Bushist propaganda and in the process, sabotaging its own critical and visionary potential.

The sad story about the world of contemporary art today is how its members have willingly assumed an attitude of self-censorship as well as simplistic and formulaic formal conceptualisms and reductiveness as necessary tools in order to insert themselves in the global art network.

Art has become an internationalized language and Art World members ambassadors of a well intentioned cultural system premised on inclusion and freedom of speech. Political engagement or ethical sensibilization is at times reduced to accepting cynically certain policies and socio-economic processes as “the lesser of evils,” contributing to the normalization of dispossession, apartheid, war and violence. This is partly due to the fact that the Artworld is subsidized by the excess produced by financial capital invested as a marketing and public relations tool that is capable of reaching out to a worldwide public: Artists now entertain the euphoric, voracious, vulgar and illiterate corporate elites producing art that caters to their masochistic and cynical tastes.

The contemporary art system is delusional insofar as its fairs and biennials continue thriving in the same purposeless way that the United States forces continue its illogical attacks and occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
As the US army keeps on blowing up people and buildings, to massacre intellectuals and to devastate culture, corporations destroy native infrastructure in the name of ‘development.’ In the meantime, the Artworld continues to subside into banality; which happens to be Western society’s only way of being able to deal with such unprecedented massive destruction. Liberal cultural thinkers defend the need for contemporary art as a spiritual oasis in these violent times we live in, but the societies where the contemporary art system thrives are at a loss when it comes to coping with their passive participation and thus, silent complicity in the ongoing wars and destruction.

Overproduction of banal contemporary art has become the solution as well as part of the problem: Art is the band-aid for reckless and massive destruction elsewhere, a compulsive activity and the vehicle of creative expression of Western angst. How long will this denial mechanism keep on thriving in our societies?

What political and moral questions are in play now in the minds of contemporary Artworld constituents?

A lot might be at stake for many, at a time of the loss of their monetary and ideological investments, when their whole-hearted liberal faith in a system supposedly incarnating democratic values about the freedom of expression is obviously collapsing. Evidently, a critical stand can be embraced by contemporary art, but only insofar as it passes as the antagonism that is inherent to a healthy democracy. This is how criticality has become an Artworld myth: in its claim to be a platform for the inclusion of all dissident voices, the Artworld conceives itself as the spokesperson of true democracy. This delirious myth is undermined by recent examples of the fascistic repression of pacific demonstrators against the policies of the G20 in Toronto, the IDF mortal attacks on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the murder of activists in San Juan Copala, Oaxaca, etc.


The intellectuals’ response to recent alarming facts and events in the world has been denial translated into one homogenous impenetrable mass of numbed nerve endings all feeling the same impotence and blind need to overproduce themselves to death like busy little ants working compulsively at an interminable construction site just before it is about to be inundated by an impending rain storm.


Again, we are faced with the overwhelming sensation that the Artworld is an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system.

In Mexico contemporary art functions as a smoke shield or a steam shield. It is not inappropriate to evoke an image by Teresa Margolles, Vaporización (2002), – an installation that consists of a room full of steaming water that had been previously used to wash the bodies of murdered people at a morgue in one of Mexico City’s most dangerous neighborhoods – as metaphor to describe the compensatory role of contemporary art in Mexico today: A seductive quasi corporeal inundation of the senses which rationalizes and at the same time nullifies itself by clouding the realities of Mexican society reinforcing the well intentioned liberal sensibilities of the privileged class here and abroad.

The aesthetico-political principles of contemporary art are blindly in sync with capitalism; this fact is rendered invisible by contemporary art itself because many of its precepts are the immovable and unquestionable bastions of modern societies. The fairly recent inclusion of contemporary Mexican art in the global panorama has fulfilled liberal Mexican society’s expectations of cultural autonomy beyond being seen as backward or a mere colonial imitation of European art. Moreover, contemporary art’s disavowal of politicized content since 9/11, has found fecund ground in neo-liberal Mexico. The trivialization of content came hand in hand with the privatization of the Mexican cultural sphere. The over-aesthetization preferred by the Mexican elite favors tedious poetic rationalizations of the daily violence lived daily in this country, underscored by the unconscious normalization of the Neoliberal situation by promoting the idea that the current worldwide financial crisis is just part of the normal cycle of creative destruction through which capitalism progresses, that creative destruction is the engine of economic growth, and that the ceaseless replacement of the old with the new brings prosperity.

Artists’ poetic and cynical gestures have become part of the problem, as the Artworld has acclimatized itself to the present climate of violence by producing objects that precisely fetishize violence. Many understand these works as denunciations or even as critiques of the reigning brutality, however, they are convenient rationalizations of phenomena promoted by the voices holding the cultural power behind the scenes. Perhaps the overwhelming socio-economic realities of the world cannot be apprehended or digested by the Artworld at this precise moment.

As Ben Davis pointed out, contemporary art tends to be purposefully elitist, to play opaque intellectual games, and to stage political action or populist spectacles that reflect the contradictions of economic reality but through the filter of the Artworld’s middle class position within such reality, necessarily oblivious to real social antagonisms. This is how the liberal, middle class attitude of the contemporary Mexican Artworld fits in perfectly with the cultural agenda of the corporate and financial ruling elites worldwide.

The war machinery and the art machinery have been working full blast for many years now, unrelentless in their overproductive destruction insofar as they are complicit with capitalism’s task of homogenizing consumer needs and aesthetic sensibilities at the global scale. Why not an art production moratorium for a while? Artists should stop showing their work, slow down and reflect upon what is happening around them; galleries and museums must close down, and art foundations and well intentioned art patrons should bring all cultural activities to a halt, until society is able to renew culture by itself, as opposed to being fed culture. The cultural elite cannot continue hiding behind institutional, commercial and cultural venues of pseudo prestige for much longer. MUACC-NILC calls for a stop to all cultural production until culture can again redefine itself within the context of the historical changes brought to our society by the current civil war, unprecedented violence and massive financial and resource dispossession. The rich live in Mexico like Arundathi Roy describes how they live in India: Like animals incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over centuries. This is the cause of the current civil war, not the few narco bandits threatening to take over the country, the evident result of decades of social injustice and manipulative blindness on the part of the Mexican elites to which artists are now complicit.