En la cuerda de la mercancía

Nevertheless, artists who do not participate in the visible mechanisms of the market simply do not exist. Their existence is precarious; the scope of their work is limited and the advertisement of their image is limited to reduced spheres, used as agglutinin to grant the city an artistic trademark to attract capital, whilst they actually receive scarce mediums to maintain or produce works, their budgets are cut or eliminated, or they are simply left to their own devices. In these cases, the socio-cultural image of the artist is manipulated unscrupulously to assert the image of the political institution, which invests in advertising and prestige (during dictatorships, in the exaltation of the dictator; in democracies, to obtain votes for elections and advertising in the media), magnifying the party in power and the financing companies. The same occurs in fairs, biennials and macro-exhibitions, where a long list of artists, both known and unknown, swell catalogues and leaflets with a view to attracting the greatest number of visitors, competing with the other mass events staged by the entertainment industry. However, after the inauguration -attended by authorities and numerous visitors-, the artists' critical capacity is ignored or silenced; they are absent from collective debates which settle artistic, urban, political and socio-cultural issues. The critical strength of the artists is paralysed by the context and by a normative space, and although the work may break it, the meaning is simultaneously silenced or neutralised by the bureaucratic and didactic structure. Alicia Framis' Secret Strikes series carried out in different companies and public institutions like the Tate Modern London, the company Inditex, the cap in Bordeaux or a bank in Utrecht, where workers and public came to a halt, interrupting all actions, whilst the production machinery and the camera worked on, prove the internal paralysis that technology and economy produce in their own operators, and their secret desire to boycott them with inaction.

Throughout the 20 th century, artists have adopted different approaches, both critical and affirmative, towards their position in society, either supporting the suppression of the figure of the artist as a producer -stressing, from Dadaism to Minimalism and land art, the impersonal execution of the work-, or confirming the myth, like Picasso, Warhol or German neo-Expressionists, worshiping the personality, narcissism and genius of the creator. Both positions are currently very evident, both among artists who strive to stand out and acquire an identity in the mass that, on different competitive levels, populates the artistic scene, and among established artists. In any case, they are part of a mass culture that benefits them. Pierre Restany already warned us of it in the late Sixties: "Abandoning the old concept of the unique object, the "luxury product" for individual use, the artist is in the process of inventing a new language of communication between human beings. Renouncing to the ambiguous role of the marginal adventurer and independent producer, the artists is preparing for a dominant role: the organisation of leisure." What Adorno called "an administered world," proving the dominion of capitalist economy over nature and the transformation of culture into industry and cultural market, which includes the production of the artist, who becomes a promoter to manage his or her work. As Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel said in an article entitled "Imagining a world without copyright", "we must admit that artists are entrepreneurs. They take the initiative to create specific works and offer them to a market." As with any other worker, the market makes the artist enter an administrative and fiscal circuit involving the payment of invoices, taxes, the calculation of benefits, copyrights and Social Security, and also funding from institutions or fees that allow them to develop large projects for museums or public spaces, as in the case of Richard Serra at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Bill Viola with the production of Tristan and Isolde for the Ópera in Paris or Anish Kapoor at the Tate Modern London. They need assistants, they travel continuously, publish catalogues of their work, videos, digital images and websites; write their résumés and work with teams formed by architects, engineers, curators, light and sound technicians, editors, etc. They employ technological instruments created by engineers and design works and exhibitions by computer, and are also users and consumers of computer programmes. Their visuality and syntax are identified, with critical and ironical distance in the best cases, with television, film, photographic advertising, design and websites. Through technology, they enter the aesthetics of virtual worlds, image factories and the entertainment industry, producing, in the worst cases, art with environmental effects, to suit the environment. There are multiple identities: from the "philosopher" artist, inspired by some quotes by Plato, Foucault and Deleuze, to the artist who takes part in the conspiracy of art and the pornography of the image; from the artist who follows the culture of amusement and parties, from the artist who supports gay, lesbian or queer sexuality and desire, to the artist who assumes the defence of marginal groups, denouncing violence, taking on the role of an ngo or narrating the chronicle of a catastrophe. The positions artists take today are interwoven in a society that allows their presence as a residue of meaning.

Translation: Laura F. Farhall