The creation of Michael Heizer’s Leviated Mass (2012) can be described in a quantitative way: it is a granite megalith weighing 340 tonnes that travelled 106 miles before being placed, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in a trench 46 feet long and 15 feet deep, and which required ten million dollars in private funding and a 43-year wait. How YouTube and Facebook Annihilated the Essence of Art The fragments that follow tend to problematize these questions: they succeed one another, in the manner of Debordian theses, in order to illustrate that the spectacle is too sly and too complex to be circumscribed. If it seems, in this context, that art can reinforce the viewer caught in the rhetoric of the spectacle there remains room to insist its role should be to express a tension between art and life. Public, co-creator, research object, and participant: the social being is at the heart of the debates about contemporary creation. Tacle” does not describe the characteristics of a work of art or architecture,īut is a definition of social relations under capitalism (but also under tota. Sexiness to corporate investment and populism. In short, spectacle today connotes a wide range of ideas – from size, scale, and How, from the point of view of social relations, do the dynamics of the spectacle influence the creation of works, their presentation, how they are experienced and, by extension, their content? The spectacle shapes and characterizes the ties between individuals, as art historian Claire Bishop affirms: The growing interest in the circuit of international art fairs, the media’s obsession with auction records, the creation of a Quebec visual arts gala by people in the art market, the valorisation of private collections, the new declensions of the ties between the art and business worlds… So many signs demonstrate an attempt to make the visual arts part of the rationale of the economic system. The visual arts are now represented as an industry. The productive system of capitalism integrates art, so thisīecomes art business, an investment strategy, a support for speculation, aįinancial product judged on its profit performance. What characterizes contemporary art is no longer transgression, but itsĮntering into conformity with the rules of the globalized market and finan-Ĭial mechanisms. In this context, they state that the role of art has changed radically since the avant-garde: In their recent book Lipovetsky and Serroy illustrate the emergence of an “artistic” capitalism this new paradigm of production and consumption, integrating aestheticism into the ensemble of the capitalist system’s activities, rests on the exacerbation of creativity and individual experience. The premise of this collection of articles is that the arts and artists have become as much the weapons as the targets of the spectacle. If this treatise continues to carry considerable critical weight, our concern here is to envisage its contemporary pertinence to the visual arts scene. Mass media lays out the territory, obviously using consumer goods: for Debord, the spectacle’s field of action is infinite. This perpetually reproduced division, which reminds us that the spectacle is “both the result and the project of the present mode of production,” 2delineates the alienation that is the central issue of his theory. “The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image ” 1 this consumer society-created illusion deploys a separation of reality and representation. Let us recall that Debord made a critique, informed by Marxist thought, of the ways in which daily life and social relationships were dominated by the commodity. The spectacle that Guy Debord denounced in his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) has pursued its insidious development over the last forty-five years. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde (2013). It has often been said that the “society of the spectacle” is outmoded in a world dominated by interactive networks and the virtual, by reference points for authenticity and transparency.
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