En la cuerda de la mercancía

Issues regarding whether the image of the artist is manufactured by the cultural industry and the media circuits in the same way as they design the image of a tennis player, singer or film star, or regarding the meaning and the merchandise that said image sells in a market, or whether there is a difference between the image of an artist and of other public figures -footballers, politicians, actors, etc.-, distributed by the entertainment machinery as idols, seem inevitable in a media-based society. The artist is obviously immersed in a capitalist structure that supports and disseminates art, without which it would not exist as it is produced today. Any nostalgia of a paradise lost -which, in any case, never existed-, in which the artist were separated from the imperatives of economy, is useless. Triumphant or in the depths of poverty, an artist's professional career is shaped by the management and promotion of galleries, fairs, museums, curators, critics and the media; as occurs with the different images, from violence to cynicism, they adopt or are conferred to them, exploited like a symbolical game. Artists are valued in the processes of a commercial system and of the circulation of images in which the visual, critical and aesthetic values of the work produce a consumption equal to telecommunications, the fashion sector, the food industries and tourism. They move masses of tourists in museums like the Tate Modern London or the Guggenheim in Bilbao, at biennials like Venice and São Paulo, and the Documenta in Kassel... They are on show in fairs, galleries, collections and auctions in the main cities; they fill the pages of books, newspapers and specialised journals all over the world with their works, interviews and manifestations, and reach astronomical prices. However, their relationship with the market is anomalous. As Marek Claassen noted in How does the art market work? : "The turnover of the inventory is very low, relatively huge sums of money are involved in infrequent transactions, collectors buy without receipt, trade transactions are made in cash, matters of privacy concerning taxation are also involved and the traded good itself is declared as or believed to be sacred." Likewise, the name and figure of most artists are distributed in institutional circuits among an audience that is more reduced and cryptic than that of the great stars of the mass culture; certain intellectual preparation is required to recognize the work of the former, whilst this is not the case of stars from the low culture. Any ignorant can read about a footballer's life -identified with a social narration about effort and success- or cheer on a tennis match, but few readers can comprehend the work of artists or admire lives characterised by opacity or rebelliousness, or actually identified with madness, dearth or eccentricity. The idolisation and high prices of the works, on the other hand, make them inaccessible to the masses. Therefore, artists -although their image is worshiped and they are part of a commercial and advertising machinery that aims, like in the case of the tennis player, footballer or singer, to make them famous and make their work quotable, or turn them into idols of an institutional or national symbol- do not become archetypical social models, they are not invited, like the others, to television talk shows, and their recognition by the general public is restricted and accessible only to cult artists, whose works have, in great part, already been assimilated historically.

Yet, whilst the market is the structure that organises, disseminates and constructs the image of the artist and the circulation of his or her work, it would be wrong to simply limit or reduce the complexity of his or her existence to the commercial framework, without considering the subjectivity and tension inherent to the complex relationship between several forces. The aporia of the contemporary artist consists in being absorbed in the dynamical game of the master and the slave in a system that he opposes to and takes part in, that nurtures him and exploits him, and performs both movements in proportional intensity. Just as the figures of Pozzo and Lucky, in Beckett's Waiting for Godot , represent the master and the slave, and need and depend on each other, thus giving way to cruelty, misery and delirium in both, paralysing the situation. The slave, given his defencelessness, cannot abandon his master, and the master cannot free the slave, who he depends on in turn to function. They both dominate each other, and thus both become master and slave. The position of the artist, that attacks the capitalist, political and institutional system -criticism is the only thing that sets art apart from a postcard-, cannot be separated from a relationship of mutual dependence, which is often shady because it is unconfessed, violent because it is insoluble, and darkly rooted in desire and narcissism, power and precariousness. That internal tension -that rope that binds Pozzo and Lucky together, which the former pulls insistently, and the suitcase with the master's food, which the, inseparable, latter carries- accommodates the artist's movement of response. The insolence and incoherence of the discourse with which the slave faces up to the master and the latter's dissatisfaction show the breakdown of both, the failure of a system in which the slave feeds off of chicken bones his master eats and then throws for him to gnaw at. The key to such a relationship is the permanence of an endless discordance, whose final meaning does not appear in reconciliation or liberation -as proposed during Romanticism and the avant-gardes-, but in its conflictive emergence.

To shatter that dependence, many artists reject the commercial and museum circuit and choose to attack the art structure to destabilise it from the inside, developing alternatives beyond commercial mediations -like mail art, cyber art or net.art-, spreading extra-media publications and adopting radical attitudes through interventions, manifestos and performances, carried out on the streets, in small galleries and in different neighbourhoods in large cities. They are supported by cultural centres and small museums that support a more open and radical concept of art, or create eccentric places with communal workshops, cooperatives, exhibitions in courtyards or private studios. They shatter conventional circuits with actions in which they include a direct relationship, a critical and socio-political reflection, with the viewer.