In "Count Zero", the 1986 sequel to his genre-defining cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer", William Gibson described a gallery system based on ownership of shares in unimaginably expensive artworks circulating in the market.
Gibson's Reagonomic future is almost our present. Pension funds for artists leverage collections of artworks, loans are offered against artworks by banks, and the super-rich use artworks as market-index-beating commodities. But in Gibson's future the artwork was still a painting, and the market stopped at the frame.
Neoliberalism's "market" is an indexical environment, the "information" it contains is linked to real-world effects with ethical import. Like the representations of art, market information is based on "figures", and like art those figures can be positive and negative and create meaning by interrelation. Leverage is a form of abstraction. And financial vehicles are compositions of abstracted figures.
This isn't to say that the FTSE 100 creates a line so economics is a form of drawing. It is to say that the market has form and aesthetics.
Leveraging the value not of artworks but of classes of artworks is simple. Create an Impressionist fund. They already exist. But this stops at the frame. If the market is truly the undeniable gravitational rule of the age, it should reach into the artwork.
An artwork consists of figures and their relations with aesthetic properties and iconographic qualities.
Leveraging the value of aesthetic properties or iconographic/semiotic entities is simple once it is recognized that the economic and art historical value of an artwork can vary based on their relative cachet. Aesthetic financial instruments/vehicles can reach into and across artworks, collaterolizing changes in the value of their form, content and subject.
This raises the possibilities of shorting, asset stripping, penny shares, spam, gold farming and other exploits within the market for aesthetic/semiotic/iconographic vehicles. Since these economic developments are tied to the artworks, they will be developments within the artworks as well.
This means that the vehicles will affect the artworks as well as the artworks affecting the vehicles. I don't mean that the artworks should be visualizations of the figures of the vehicles. I mean that the artworks will be affected by these. This is a particularly pure representation of the neoliberal fantasy. Art is the place for such things.
Art shows things as they are known to be rather than as they actually are, whether the mediaeval end of the world or individual liberty. Jeff Koons's carefully priced sculptures and Danica Phelps's money stripes are precursors to an art that does not represent the aesthetics of neoliberal economics but is represented by them.
Hot stock, blue on gold...
[From notes made while on holiday earlier in the year and a comment at Art Fag City.]
When I was at art school, two of my colleagues found a wall from a
demolished building on some wasteland out of town that would have made
an excellent canvas for a mural they were planning. But it was covered
in graffiti. Real graffiti by kids with spraycans, not
destined-for-publication graphic designer posturing. To make their
mural they would have had to destroy it.
One of them later acknowledged to me that they'd done the right thing by not doing so.
As capitalism does another ideological reset the excuse du jour is that the credit crunch was a highly improbable event, a "black swan" (it's not just a bad song by Thom Yhork).
If this is true then the people who sold unsustainable mortgages to get the commission on them then sold them on rather than take on the risk of those mortgages were behaving irrationally, because they could not have foreseen that anyone would default on them. This would raise more questions than it answers.
The problem isn't probability. The sub-prime market was exploited in the way it was because of its probabilities, not despite them. The problem is greed. And self-pitying denial won't disguise that, however dense the notation.
It's the twenty-first anniversary of the announcement of the GNU project today. GNU is a project to create a Free Software operating system, that is software for your computer that does not allow other people to restrict your freedom to use it.
I'm writing this on a laptop running Fedora, which is a Free Software distribution based on GNU. I'm writing it in Firefox, also Free Software, using Movable Type, again Free Software, running on a Free Software web server.
From almost no Free Software a quarter of a century ago to pervasive Free Software today. There is always more work to be done, and new threats to the freedom to use software freely, but GNU has been a great success. Never let anyone tell you that pragmatism is more important or more powerful than ethics.
Happy birthday GNU!
