En la cuerda de la mercancía

The image of rebellious, anti-establishment artists, their socio-symbolical function as critical heroes -denouncing conflict where order seems to reign; unconcealing the tension and resisting the violence of a system-, end up being absorbed by a crisis of meaning caused by technology, by the insertion of the artist in the market and in the institution, by the actual propaganda that mythicises them. The artist's critical capacity is in danger of being neutralised by the exhibition context and by a complex administration and dissemination configuration, which sweetens the work levelling it with a promotional product similar to anything produced by the industries that endorse music, fashion, sport or commercial cinema, and standardises it, either treating it as symbolical or negative waste, needed to inoffensively "drain" conflicts, or idolising it and granting it an extraordinary cultural dimension. The mass reproduction of images has trivialised and dissolved the so-called "contents," reducing them to appearances and including the image of the artist in what Jean Baudrillard, in a lucid albeit excessively furious attack, calls, in The Conspiracy of Art , a "pornography" of the image. In a metalanguage of banality, where the artist no longer represented a dramatic or heroic role, but a sarcastic parody of culture, where art, as a form of revenge, illustrated radical disappointment, the portraits of Nadal and Picasso, a tennis player and an artist, would stand for the same thing: they are both produced, sold and devoured by a system that manufactures, distributes and consumes images (taking advantage of singularities, even, to increase the value). In this sense, Baudrillard supports the "destruction of art from the inside" and artists finding their inspiration in "advertising gags, humour, irony, criticism, the trompe l'oeil that currently characterises publicity and floods the art world," and offering one and the other, on the same visual level of sale and consumption, to the customer and the viewer. In the Sixties, Andy Warhol understood these phenomena like few others and used his own life to reconstruct the image of a rebellious artist and an outsider in a unruffled simulation whose ambiguity and irony -in the portraits of Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse Tung and Elvis Presley, and the Coca Cola bottles or the boxes of Brillo detergent- fell within the dimensions of the market, appearance and advertising. As opposed to Duchamp, who attacked the art system by destructuring the (museum) context in which the work was inserted, denying its aesthetic value, post-modern artists, led by Warhol, placed their works within a (commercial) context, advertising their aesthetic value. Warhol created a new notion of an artist who socialised at parties -inaugurations and gatherings-, was adored and esteemed by museums, galleries and the mass media, who sold a fictional image in the market as an aesthetic product. Thus, he contributed to elaborating and managing the figure of an "artist" whose singular personality was greater than the value of the work. His pale face, thin body, look and walk created a brand that was globally recognised, and stood for a lifestyle, a guarantee that established an unquestionable similarity between the quality of his figure and that of his works, and merged the appearance of the author with the vacuum of his portraits. He positioned himself on the same visual level as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Mao Tse Tung and defined himself as "a machine," with the same death wish that attacks all heroes. Beuys also created a similar mythology around his figure, with his cane, suit and hat; his image of a shaman of the modern city opposed to the homus tecnicus challenging the new world with the synergy of his installations, with the magnetic field of a post-war and post-industrial archaeology, and, like Warhol, he established his personality in the ghostly surfaces of the photographs that appeared in catalogues, international magazines and art books, appreciating it beyond the significance of the work. Since one of the permanent laws of advertising is that the brand identity has to be immutable: like a Coca Cola bottle, the shape is always the same, making it recognisable and preventing its dissolution in the blur of images that race around the ephemeral universe of virtuality. Just as the image has to reveal the professional identity of a tennis player, a footballer, a singer or a politician, with the right setting and clothing, the artist has to be identified as an artist, generating a scenery and a style, holding imaginary and symbolical attributes that legitimise and characterise him or her as such. A game played by Gilbert & George, or the couple John Lennon and Yoko Ono or Jeff Koons with the dog Puppy , who became idols in their own right. Yet, whilst these artists parody fetishism, others take advantage of it to be adored by the masses. This is the case of the "Chillida enterprise," in which the sculptor's actual family take part, creating a Foundation with the artist's name, with large inaugurations attended by kings, financiers and politicians, and the global distribution of his work, with a specific logo that establishes it as a luxurious object on several products; or the Picasso, Dalí or Miró "emporiums," whose most famous images are inserted in popular consumption, worshiping the personality of artists that transcends the rebellious and creative meaning of their own life and work. The fact that certain companies adopt their names to identify a product and advertise a commodity, from a vehicle to a perfume -sometimes against the wishes of the actual institutions and families-, is indicative of the extent to which the originality of the figure of the artist is absorbed by a rampant capitalism as an intangible asset.