En la cuerda de la mercancía

In a society where the consumer industries and the entertainment sector set the trends and cultural demands, the construction of the image of the artist gives rise to questions that drift away from the romantic and modern myths manufactured by the avant-gardes. The fall of the archetypical values of originality and geniality, of the tragic and existentialist hero, of the artiste maudit and the sauvage , of the revolutionary or the artist that constructs and transforms society, responds not only to a variation in the mythical-social paradigm of the figure of the artist -in a world where success is a condition required to access the public sphere-, but also to the economic and financial system in which it is engaged and which, as Adorno stated in the prologue to Dialectic of Enlightenment , recognises all products -even thought- as equals. Both Capitalism and Marxism worshiped the artist's personality, ideologically mythicizing a resistant and heroic figure, sometimes poor and destitute, others successful and triumphant, granting artists a symbolical and social role, and adapting their image -or counter image- to the new models and functions required by a mass, industrialised society. The different identities, from the Romantic genius to the engineering or creative artist, that artists adopted throughout the 20 th century responded to the myths that culture spun around values like the machine, beauty, the commonplace, history, otherness , reality, reason, death or madness, and, as of the 1950s, with the reconstruction of a new world, the nation. Thus, a new North American art was created by Capitalism after World War II, seeking a national identity and a market to oppose to the European scene, which found its inspiration in the figures of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clifford Still and Mark Rothko, who represented the United States as an original country with roots in American Indian ethnic groups and palaeontology, a rich country, with immense landscapes and heroes like cowboys and rebels, who were tragic and narcissistic (on screen, the figures of James Dean and Marlon Brando), demiurges who opposed to the power of technology and of a booming market which lauded them as idols and plunged them into suicide, accident or personal failure. Subsequently, the creation of figurative trends like the Italian Trans-Avant-Garde, a cosmopolitan, parodic and ironic movement, launched by critics like Achille Bonito Oliva, or the systematic promotion of the figures of Salle, Basquiat or Schnabel in New York as us superstars for a mass market, supposed the launch of artists by curators in major European biennials and shows. In the case of German Neo-Expressionism, with the New Savages, and artists as important as Georges Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz and A. R. Penck, a new type of artist was designed to face up to power: cultured and politically and socially critical, insolent and negative, seemingly afflicted by subterranean despair, who violently attacked the configuration of reality, the city and history. Whilst they championed the slogan "An artist's fist is also a fist," at the same time they adapted to the high prices set by the gallery circuit and infiltrated the powerful commercial system developed as of the Eighties by collectors and dealers. The tension between the critical and marginal character of the work and its participation in the market placed the artist in an ambiguous situation. In opposition to marketing schemes that designed the figure of an artist incorporated in capitalist structures and the welfare society, the artistic achievements of the anti-establishment and radical creators of the Sixties and Seventies -from Viennese action art to happenings, from fluxus and performance to land art-, who sought to break away from the models of the luxury market and pursued a political, revolutionary art, that believed in social and urban structures, were systematically aestheticised and incorporated into commercial programmes. As Marcel Duchamp wrote in a letter to Hans Richter in 1962: "I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty."