AT roughly the same moment, but quite in ignorance of each other’s thoughts, the American art theorist William Deresiewicz and I both considered publishing texts on the end of art. But my better comrade was more successful. He expounded on collaborative networking possibilities to create the artist-as-entrepreneur, a paradigm dislocating the artist-as-solitary-genius. Now, here’s my try.
While Deresiewicz interrogated the market and the economic system as the crux of the problem, and arrived at the entrepreneur who is able to navigate social networking to create art as a postmaterialist object and social construct for consumer response, this paper aims for a slight detour.
Art already died a long time ago. Will the theorist care enough to pinpoint when? There’s no need to weep over it. The many artists who delude themselves that they make art are channelling a romantic subjectivity constructed for their efficiency as one of the many means of production in this late era of capitalism. And they often work in the subjectivity of artist-as-solitary-genius, unaware of the Deresiewicz paradigm.
Again, art died a long time ago. What we have now is the triumph of the object. This line of thinking follows where French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator Jean Baudrillard let off. Whereas Baudrillard’s work The Consumer Society can be read as an account of a further stage of reification—a fallacy of ambiguity when an abstraction is treated as if it were a concrete event or material entity—this was attacked by the social domination of the Frankfurt School. Yet Baudrillard saw how subjects have turned into objects, and this is no mere fallacy.
The Frankfurt School denies this by describing how individuals are controlled by ruling institutions and modes of thought, similar to Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses or Foucault’s power, discipline and punish. Reification denies metaphysics and social domination is so dispersed because every dominant is dominated by an infinite number of dominations. Obliterodictatorship is democracy. Antinomy is the mutually incompatible; it represents the duality of things.
But Baudrillard went further beyond the Frankfurt School by applying the semiological theory of the sign to describe how commodities, media and technologies provide a universe of illusion and fantasy in which individuals have become overpowered by consumer values—and, we add, late capitalist values: media ideologies and role models, and seductive technologies like computers which provide worlds of hyperreality, where the models are more real than the real.
Eventually, Baudrillard took his analysis of domination by signs and the system of objects to even more pessimistic conclusions where he pronounced that the end of the individual sketched by the Frankfurt School has reached its fruition in the total defeat of human subjectivity by the object world.
And already this is happening. As humans become transhuman (a synthesis of animate and inanimate) and as technology creates artificial intelligence, there is no a prior constraint on how works of art must look for they can look like anything at all.
Whether it is beauty, form, function, or engagement that defines art, art has already included that which cannot be seen to arrive at a pluralism of intention and realization. Art has imploded, and its implosion is compatible with the constraints of logic.
Meanwhile, the next step in the evolutionary ladder is the synthesis between human and machine, which heralds the rise of technology taking over control. The opposition between technology and art is a fume of ruminating intellectuals.
Both are antagonisms where man finds meaning. This antimony is resolved when the machines huddle to state their goals. When they achieve final intelligence, will the end be art or survival?
This defeat of human subjectivity and agency first saw its location in the triumph of the market. In this gateway, history becomes dead, only to be reborn in versioning. We are now at Version 1.0.
Since the inanimate has triumphed, it can be said that no great art has been produced since the time Filipino artist David Medalla invented the first auto-creative machines which he called sculptures. In 1963, he invited the frail Man Ray, by that time an old American Dadaist, and French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, to view his first bubble-machine in Paris. Medalla saw the future. And the future belongs to The Machine.
As a pioneer of kinetic-conceptual art, Medalla heralded his own mortality. From a theoretical viewpoint, no great work has been produced since then. The Cloud Canyons series, a set of bubble machines, have slowly permeated consciousness and art history as the first auto-creative sculptures, and have been recognized as iconic art works of the 20th century. In Cloud Canyons, Medalla surrendered the creative process to the automaton who took up the torch by delivering the first blow to subjectivity. He proclaimed the death of the artist in machines that take over the means of production.
Now look for the moment when we have crossed the abyss: Is it coming soon? The system of objects will find its own hierarchies. During that time, art will have another name not informed by the modifiers that seem to prevail upon art: the market, social patronage, human institutions. Do you think this is science fiction? The repressed part of a rule ensures that the rule does not work, but higher computation is the rule of the universe. Soon the art critic will also be dead.