Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization

by Max Haiven

Overview

We imagine that art and money are old enemies, but this myth actually reproduces a violent system of global capitalism and prevents us from imagining and building alternatives.

From the chaos unleashed by the 'imaginary' money in financial markets to the new forms of exploitation enabled by the 'creative economy' to the way art has become the plaything of the world's plutocrats, our era of financialization demands we question our romantic assumptions about art and money. By exploring the way contemporary artists engage with cash, debt and credit, Haiven identifies and assesses a range of creative strategies for mocking, sabotaging, exiting, decrypting and hacking capitalism today.

Written for artists, activists and scholars, this book makes an urgent call to unleash the power of the radical imagination by any media necessary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786803191
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	08/20/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Max Haiven is Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University, Canada. His books include Revenge Capitalism, Art after Money, Money after Art, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power and The Radical Imagination.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

3.5 artistic strategies to envision money's mediation

Perhaps the best-known and most written-about artist to work with money is the late American J.S.G. Boggs. Famously, Boggs developed a practice of painstakingly replicating banknotes in pen and ink, creating uncannily mimetic but one-of-a-kind replicas of currency, usually with one or two small adjustments: his signature and title would replace that of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (or other national bank head, in other countries). Sometimes, he would insert his own portrait in place of a dead president. In any case, in spite of growing interest in his notes throughout his career, Boggs never directly sold the works. Instead, he would engage in earnest participatory rituals with shopkeepers, waiters and cashiers at stores and museums in which he acknowledged that his drawings were art, but that he wished them to be accepted at the face value of the currency depicted. While Boggs would later develop a practice of selling the residue of his successful transactions (receipts issued, items purchased, change given) as art, his real goal, according to Lawrence Wescheler's wonderful book on the artist, was the social engagement the art provided, as well as the official reaction it elicited, including several legal entanglements for counterfeiting.

At stake in Boggs' well-known work is a knot of questions about representation at the intersection of art and money. On one level, Boggs produces a representation of money which he asks be accepted as art, but as if it were money. He is essentially selling a drawing, but selling it as if it were money, which you don't sell but spend. You don't sell money because you can only sell something for money: what defines a sold object or service is that it was exchanged for money. And you can't "spend" art, because art is not money.

There is much at work here, including questions about the fundamental nature of value itself, which is Weschler's concern. Mine is about the riddle of representation. His art re-presents money, but seeks to be present in the economy as money. Implicitly, it begs the question of what money represents. Does it represent a share of social wealth, and if so is Boggs' counterfeit a form of skullduggery, a parasitic forgery that makes a false claim to that wealth? Or is money (as most dominant schools of economics insist) the natural evolution of barter, hence Boggs' rituals of exchange where art is offered in return for (other) goods and services somehow a more earnest or authentic act of transaction? Or is the paper money Boggs emulates simply the (angelic or demonic) creation of state fiat, a worthless piece of paper whose value is guaranteed only by the signature of the implicitly violent sovereign (or that sovereign's duly appointed representative), hence Boggs' intervention is a subversive promethean act of appropriated authority?

My approach in this chapter, which also aims to lay out some foundational terms for the rest of this book, begins from the observation that it is not accidental that Boggs' successful artistic career coincides with the period of neoliberal financialization, when, in the so-called Post-Bretton Woods era of free floating exchange rates and the increased proliferation of so-called fictitious capital, the meaning and value of money is everywhere in crisis. But while we will delve into this history more in Chapter 2, in this chapter I wish to sketch this crisis as connected to a much broader suite of crises of representation in politics, culture, society and economics. Ultimately, understanding these crises, and the way they all stem from and help reproduce fundamental contradictions within the capitalist version of money, helps contextualize the work of artists like Boggs, who seek to transform money into a creative and critical medium of expression and experimentation.

I identify three strategies critical artists use to engage with money. Well, actually, three and a half: the first half-strategy is simply the uncritical (or cynically, performatively hypo-critical) glorification of money in art, which, I argue, is highly germane to the growing market for artwork about money stimulated by the crass desires of a new breed of so-called High Net Worth Individuals: the financially engorged super-elite who are the agents and byproducts of the growth of fictitious capital. Beyond the production of money-themed "baubles for billionaires," critical artwork that mobilizes money might be said to engage in three strategies, each of which cross cut various media and styles, from the sculptural to the performative to the digital. The first strategy is one of revelation, where art's residual critical and moral authority is mobilized to reveal the pathological cannibalism of society by money. The second strategy of reflexivity, however, implicitly or explicitly problematizes the first: it seeks (correctly) to call attention to the way art is far from innocent in this process but, indeed, a more or less crucial part of the circuits of increasingly speculative accumulation of economic, social and cultural capital that define the chaotic world system today.

Yet as much as this strategy is important, I have reservations, and I am keen to identify a third strategy of rendering labor visible, by which I mean to indicate something deeper and more profound about money (and art) that will preoccupy me throughout this book: the way that money, like a holographic shard, holds encrypted within it the capitalist totality of which it is a crucial part and mediation. More importantly still, money refracts, in skewed and fragmentary form, the potential that labor, which is to say the human relational creative energies on which capitalism feeds and which it seeks to organize, might form itself otherwise. In other words, in this third strategy money is mobilized by artists to offer us a momentary glimpse of the potential for a very different society, one where labor (cooperative, imaginative energies) is organized on bases other than exploitation and accumulation.

But in order to arrive at that conclusion, we need to start with the conundrum of the impossible imperative to represent a capitalist totality, which I think, especially today, manifests as a general crises of representation, not only for artists but also for economics, finance and other fields. And so it is to these questions we must first turn.

CRISES OF REPRESENTATION

In the introduction to his book Representing Capital, Frederic Jameson articulates a conundrum that has run throughout his career as a prominent Marxist cultural critic: the fact that capital, that massive force in our world, that inhuman yet all-too-human intelligence or agency at the core of the capitalist economy, both demands representation and refuses to be represented. His book, which is a reading of the first volume of Marx's Kapital, focuses on how that famous text is at once the most robust attempt to represent capital through language, and also, ultimately, a beautifully failed project.

Drawing on the insights of György Lukács, Jameson explains that this is because, in contrast to the hypotheses of mainstream economists, capitalism is not simply an economic system whose power is limited to the ebb and flow of commodities and the exploitation of labor. Rather, capitalism is a "totality": its economic components rely, ultimately, on political choices; these political choices in turn rely on a set of cultural meanings; these cultural meanings in turn rely on aesthetic conventions; and these conventions in turn rely on economic fundamentals. Or, if you prefer, the social, cultural, economic, political, aesthetic and ideological components of capitalism all fit together in a non-linear, non-causal way. In answer to the charges of economic reductionism that have so long dogged Marxist cultural critique, Jameson wants us to develop an understanding of capitalism that sees all these dimensions as interconnected and inter-reliant, like a proverbial house of cards.

In this sense, capitalism is a form of power that is intimately stitched into the fabric of everyday life and which animates and is animated by a host of social institutions (in the broadest sociological sense of the term), from investment banks to heterosexual monogamy, from the aesthetics of postmodern pastiche to the structures of representative democracy. A notion of capitalist totality does not mean that resistance is futile, or that all individuals and all social structures robotically and uncritically obey the grim dictates of capitalism in every case. Rather, it means that each and every social, aesthetic, political, cultural or economic process must be unpacked and understood dialectically. That is, we must approach everything as a site of power and contestation, capture and flight, difference and repetition, utopianism and dystopianism, price and value. Yet unlike a cheapened quasi-Foucauldianism, with its blithe celebration of "resistance" for its own sake, such an approach insists that we recall the way in which all these forms of power are unified or contextualized within the most remarkable, unique and (in light of the current global ecological catastrophe) dangerous form of social organization in human history. By the same token, recalling capitalist totality also reminds us and reveals that this whole paradigm is the product of some perverse and almost unrecognizable formation of human cooperation, and that, as a result, for all its power it is open to radical and revolutionary transformation.

Such an approach to capitalist totality also implies, for Jameson, an understanding of the so-called crisis of representation, a term familiar in many disciplines. It pervades, for instance, the postmodern aesthetic scene, animated as it is by a distrust of modernist, Romantic and Enlightenment representational strategies, from realism to surrealism to socialist realism. Such a crisis has delivered us to an artistic moment more than ever dedicated to endless introspection, deconstruction, cynicism, irony and a concern with process, where the objective of art is no longer to represent the world but to (often ostentatiously) call into question the very desire to represent in the first place.

This crisis of representation, tied as it is to the rise of postmodernity (or "late capitalism") is familiar in other spheres as well. For instance, political studies have, for years, been struggling with the question of how to justify the claims of so-called "representative governments," especially in an age of globalization. This is an age when multiculturalism is a (sometimes thorny) fact of life, when indigenous nations around the world are making their rightful claims against colonial-settler states, and when human migration seems to have become more common and more liquid than ever. More profoundly, it is an age where the seemingly borderless force of transnational capitalism wreaks utter havoc on economies and societies around the world with impunity, and often with government complicity. Whom the state represents and how that representation ought to be imagined is everywhere in crisis, a crisis, it should be noted, that worryingly has been leveraged by reactionary and revanchist forces, eager to generate political capital through the abjectification of already marginalized populations.

So too might we point to a crisis of representation in the realm of economics, one brought so horrifically home to roost in 2008 when literally trillions of dollars worth of equity seemingly disappeared into the ether over a matter of days. This was, in effect, a double crisis of representation. First, it was a crisis for the hegemonic discipline of mainstream economics that was ultimately forced to concede that its quasi-scientific measures and formula for representing global wealth and its movements had failed in their task. Or, in perhaps other words, economics was revealed to be what Pierre Bourdieu always told us it was: a particularly powerful and utile, if deeply problematic, form of sociology. From this perspective, economics might be imagined better as a form of socioeconomic praxis which, through the orchestration and promulgation of a sophisticated yet ideologically constrained and skewed representational paradigm, managed to conscript and merge the vast majority of mainstream political interests (whether allegedly free-market or allegedly socialist) under the same banner. Neoliberal economism has largely been able to insist that there was essentially an almost mimetic relationship between social reality and the representational forms of economic measurement and theory, largely by masquerading as a quantitative "science" whose discourse could only be challenged at the level of statistic minutia, and only by duly ordained experts. It is as if economics has actualized and fulfilled the dreams Peter Bürger assigned to the twentieth century avant-garde, collapsing the distinction between life and art, collapsing the hiatus between presence and representation.

Second, the 2008 financial crisis was also the moment when the main instruments of a financialized global economy showed themselves to be functional — or perhaps more accurately weaponized — representations that can change the reality they claim to represent. Social scientists of finance, including Donald MacKenzie and Brian LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, have argued that financial models and instruments operated as, in MacKenzie's terms, "performative" structures: they do not simply represent objective financial realities, they bring those realities into being. This occurs in ways reminiscent of Foucault's exploration of the way discourses or regimes of truth, rather than describing objective realities, create new orders of power and knowledge. Christian Marazzi, though he does not employ Mackenzie's language of "performative" speech acts, has likened the play of financial markets to a linguistic game, though one intimately connected to the struggle over language, power and labor germane to the contemporary politics of the "general intellect" and cognitive capitalism. Likewise Marazzi's associate Franco 'Bifo' Berardi has likened the imaginative acrobatics of the financial sphere to a form of perverse poetry. Brian Massumi has characterized this more of power that creates its own ontological basis through generative speculation and relentless preemption as onto-power. I have elsewhere sought to show how the financial realm both generates on an order of the imagination and creativity within its own institutional auspices, but also transforms the imagination in "financialized" society at large.

Beyond the financial sector's depraved antics, this crisis of representation in the global economy at large has dramatic and sorrowful impacts. It is borne out, for instance, in the fact that a startling percentage of the world's farmers are themselves malnourished thanks to the way global financialized capitalism undervalues their labor, gambles with global crop prices and drives corporate biopiracy. More broadly, it manifests in the cruel ironies of austerity, where somehow countries that were rich yesterday are poor today, though the nuts and bolts of their economies have not substantively changed.

In other words, the crisis of representation is also a crisis that emerges from and reinforces some profound disconnection between the price of things and their actual value. There is some fundamental and terrifying chasm between, on the one hand, the quantity and qualities of money in a globalized age and, on the other, all those things that, today, increasingly, money seems to unduly influence: the value of food, the value of art, the value of human life, the value of culture, the value of land, the value of the public sphere, the value of the climate itself in an age of "carbon credits" and "carbon markets." Such a realization goes beyond the impressive but ultimately unsurprising (though somehow extremely popular) conclusions of Thomas Piketty, which tracks the growing gap between rates of return on private investments and the overall rate of economic growth, and the rising rates of inequality which such a gap portends. There is, somehow, a deeper philosophical issue at work, one about what money and what wealth actually represents. Money seems to measure or represent everything today, or, more accurately, mismeasure and misrepresent everything.

Whatever the case, the crisis — or crises — of representation outlined here are reflected in the strategies and idioms of today's social movements, as Dario Azzelini and Marina Sitrin note in their demonstratively titled survey They Can't Represent Us! Here, they show how the tenor of today's movements around the world cleaves toward the production of autonomy and horizontal grassroots power on the level of daily life. High profile, charismatic manifestations such as the Movement of the Squares in Southern Europe or the Occupy Movement strive to create immanent modes of direct, participatory democracy that reject a logic of representative leadership and encourage the direct engagement of all members. But, as Azzelini and Sitrin note, this is evidence of a deeper tendency to see the field of everyday life and social relationships as the terrain of power and solidarity, reflected in the way many social movements, especially in the Global South, are occupying workplaces, mobilizing communities and developing new popular social and economic institutions.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Art after Money, Money after Art"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Max Haiven.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Figures
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. 3.5 Artistic Strategies To Envision Money’s Mediation
2. 6 Artists x 2 Crises x 3 Orders Of Reproduction
3. 0 Participation: Benign Pessimism, Tactical Parasitics and the Encrypted Common
4. ∞ Encryption: Art’s Crypt, Securitization in Numbers, Derivative Socialities
5. Conclusion: Toward Abolitionist Horizons
Notes
Subject Index
Name Index

Editorial Reviews

Daring, brilliant, provocative. At last a radical critique of the crypto-approach and an abolitionist approach to the problem of money and art.”
 

Franco Berardi

Perhaps the most theoretically creative radical thinker of the moment.” 

David Graeber

'Perhaps the most theoretically creative radical thinker of the moment' - - David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2014) 'Daring, brilliant, provocative. At last a radical critique of the crypto-approach and an abolitionist approach to the problem of money and art' - Franco Berardi, Philosopher, author of Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (Verso, 2017)

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