Part 3
In the decade that followed the 2008 financial crisis, a generation of artists emerged for whom studying an MBA was as important, if not even more important, than studying art history. The artist Walter Robinson described their work as Zombie Formalism: “Formalism because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting, and Zombie because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg […] With their simple and direct manufacture, these artworks are elegant and elemental, and can be said to say something basic about what painting is—about its ontology, if you think of abstraction as a philosophical venture. Like a figure of speech or, perhaps, like a joke, this kind of painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings. […] Finally, these pictures all have certain qualities—chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm—that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design.”[1]
A decade later the brand spread from Zombie Formalism into Zombie Figuration and continued mutating into Zombie Conceptualism, and anything else the market might be able to flip[2] for a profit. As the market virus took root the art world was struck down by a deadly dose of Stockholm Syndrome and fell in love with its hedge fund hijackers. The hostages changed coats and kidnapped their own imagination to demand an even better ransom price for their own fiscal freedom, purging everything from the work of art except the price tag. The work of art became the perfect asset and financial token emptied out of any other reference or form of signification. The garret and squat was replaced by armies of assistants manufacturing tokens for an exclusion cell of hyper luxury stripped of any emotion and consequence. The Wool was literally pulled over all eyes and stupidity was sold as an obscure intelligence only because it sold for more than the price a red Ferrari! Art became a profession that was no longer defined by technical skill, intellectual rigor, or even integrity. Production values soared and works of art finetuned themselves towards the highest end of entertainment and luxury branding. The art gallery was purged into a desensitized aseptic bunker devoid of humanity, maintained by a finishing school of well-dressed interns sampled from the world’s wealthiest families.
The wounds, barbs, scars, cuts and abrasions that once defined the Avant Garde of the early twentieth century, were carefully wrapped up the swathing of the ultimate luxury goods quarantine zone. Art shifted from a zone of contestation, abjection and aversion into the consolation of comfort. The architecture, design and function of contemporary art galleries increasingly began to resemble hospitals and clinics and lost touch with humanity. Trading works of art was better than printing money because art has no intrinsic financial value and better still, the price of any work of art is simply determined by how much someone is willing to pay, nothing more. “Art for art’s sake” flipped into “Art for market’s sake.”
The final nail in the coffers were the auction houses because unlike the stock exchange, the price of a work of art sold at auction is determined by only two people, the bidder who buys the work and the under-bidder who raises the price. The protocols of industry discretion mean that the bidder and under-bidder could both be working for the same investor, gallery or could even be the artist themself. The only money that is not transferred between the person selling and person buying is the so-called ‘buyers-fee’ paid to the auctioneer. If the buyer and seller are the same person, or from the same consortium, the cost of raising the value of a work of art from €3,000 to €300,000 at auction is ONLY the buyers fee, but the market value of every other €3,000 work by the same artist is raised to €300,000.
In addition to raising the value of an artist’s entire production with a high price at auction, the press and publicity generated from the sale automatically increases the artist’s branding which in turn leads to even more sales given that the artist is consequently marked as “good investment.” The branding also generates merchandising spin offs and artist’s like KAWS, Banksy, Murakami, Shepard Fairey, Daniel Arsham and Yayoi Kusama have created lucrative empires of prints, toys, t-shirts, posters and skateboards. In some instances the merchandising profits can exceed the sale of their art.
Money laundering laws make it illegal for the buyer and seller to be connected, but at the same time there are other laws and industry protocols that protect the identity of the buyer and seller, so nobody except the auction house would know without a warrant. Any money earned through the sale of a work of art sold at auction is automatically art-washed as legitimate, regardless of much the work was originally bought for, who the work was sold to or where the money came from, unless the auction house decides to expose their client. Recent money laundering laws demand that the seller must verify the identity of the buyer which is the equivalent of asking a suicide bomber at the airport if they packed their bags themselves because the answer remains the same either way. Given that the works of art are not bound by any country or region, the market can be moved anywhere else in the world when regulations become too complex in one country or financial market.
More than one generation of artists, curators, galleries, consultants, collectors and art historians have since emerged for whom art is judged solely by price, production value and investment. At the same time that churches and cathedrals emptied out and lost their flock, the queues to enter new museums like the Tate Modern, MoMa, Pompidou and Guggenheim grew longer and louder. This new audience were educated about art on Social Media and through populist mainstream press that spun marvelous stories about the luxury lifestyles of rich and famous artists whose work sold for millions. People flocked to the new art cathedrals to pay their respects to their million dollar icons effectively obliging museums to dumb their program and collections down to ‘get-it’ art, with the philosophical weight of a t-shirt slogan. “These paintings belong to and assume the logic of the feed: designed to be apprehended in under five seconds. The oldest critique of modern art in the book is to say: ‘My child could make this.’ Usually this refers to a sloppy, high-concept piece. Most bad figurative painting is the opposite: these are technically proficient paintings lacking in world-views or provocations. They don’t look like they were painted by children; they look like they were conceptualised by children to please other children.”[3]
The relationship between good art, bad art, the market and money laundering, became extremely complex and problematic. Both bad art and great art broke auction records. Both great art and “crapstraction”[4] was weaponized by investors into blue chip assets. The greatest challenge that artists have no choice but to confront today, is that it’s impossible to see the trees for the wood and everything, everywhere is Dr-OWNED out, everywhere, all at once by the market. There have been so many false flags and so much misinformation, market manipulation and insider trading used to sell Zombie Tokens as art that the sincere gallerist, collector or curator now finds themselves in a Cry Wolf situation in which it is no longer possible to see a great work of art even when it is staring them in the face. In the white cube no one can hear you scream because your words have no meaning.
The Zombie Figurative market is already waning and being phased out in favour of what might be described as Zombie Wokeism in which the socio-political checklist of the artist’s gender and identity provide a snake-oil guilt washing ointment that instantly erases generations of misogyny and racism. With a single overpriced acquisition, all the toxic masculinity, patriarchal prejudice, racism and white privilege lifestyles of the rich and famous are washed out with a #woke checklist version of “chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design.” Nothing really changes in the power dynamic because the authentic and politically pressing issues driving the post-colonial movement get thrown out with the trash can of history in upcycled garbage bags of woke branding.
Part 4
Then came ChatGPT and it warned “Be Afraid - Be Very Afraid!”
The rise of generative AI and language learning bots like ChatGPT means that we no longer need an artist to make a work of art because, any smartphone can take a photograph without a camera, paint a picture without a brush, and endlessly produce aesthetically appealing works of art with “a chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design.”[5]
The advantage that AI has over every human being, is that it collects, analyses and processes our meta-data to drug each of us individually with our own needs, tastes, fears and desires. It is the perfect designer drug because it plugs directly into our personal habits so seamlessly that very few people even notice the intoxication. Based on your habits, the algorithm profiles and tracks you in much the same way as the Hollywood F.B.I. profiler hunts the psychopath by their habits. What we say is not what we mean, because seeing is no longer believing in a world in which Artificial Intelligence is on everyone’s fingertips. The revolution will not be televised because your phone is always listening to everything you say, and the algorithm ensures you only see what you have already said. The Web3 is now the opiate of choice and as our addiction grows, the smart phone ensures that we will forever follow the path of least resistance, from comfortable to docile, and then from dumb to even more dumber and then the dumbest (sic) shall inherit the Earth.
Now that machines can weaponize the algorithm into making perfectly tailored works of art better suited to your individual taste than any human is capable of, what is the value, meaning and use of art or artists in society? The entire Zombie market of empty signifiers is suddenly caught stark naked, and the artists / galleries / auctions / consultants who collaborated in producing the Emperor’s New Clothes left exposed on the catwalk grandstands. Pity be the ZOM-BUYER collector who then buys a painting that looks as if it was designed by an algorithm when they can simply print their own Zombie token designed by an algorithm instead. The price we unwittingly pay is the sacrifice of curiosity – why search for anything when anything, everything, anywhere is available, predigested to your taste, at the stroke of your thumb, ready to be delivered directly into the palm of your hand. Our lives are increasingly being automated as our feeds reflect exactly what we want to see and what we think we need to hear, creating the false comfort that our blind faith was right all along and the entire world agrees. The Terminator War is already raging, but we are not fighting against robots so much as our own stupidity.
The coming of age of generative AI bots like DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT4 is the most significant threat to human nature, civilization and culture as we know them. “Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When ai hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.”[6]
Everything that art has become can now be done by AI and everyone with a smartphone is now taking photographs and anyone can now make art. On the 13 March 2023, Boris Eldagsen issued a statement refusing to accept his award for winning the creative open category of the Sony World Photography Award because his entry had been artificially generated by DALL-E 2, an image generator developed by OpenAI, the same company that created ChatGPT. He had entered the competition to test the expert judges’ ability to see the difference, but they did not. His statement read “Thank you for selecting my image and making this a historic moment, as it is the first AI generated image to win in a prestigious international PHOTOGRAPHY competition. How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it? AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.”[7]
Machines cannot feel emotions and cannot be possessed by spirit so the art they create will never be anything except decoration and entertainment. In contrast “The True artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths”[8] “through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences.”[9]
It’s too easy for to blame the brokers and artists can only blame themselves for preaching to the converted and playing to the gallery brokers. It became too easy to be an artist and far too many have lost track of their craft by failing to live between the social cracks of every class and embody the freedoms forbidden to any other profession. Art history is the sharp guillotine blade at the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s pendulum that swings from the superficial aesthetics of Rococo to the brutal realism of artist’s like Courbet on account of the violent politics of French Revolution and the blade is about to swing back in a contrary direction.
Today the true artist knows that they can no longer take their role in society for granted and with great urgency is now obliged to re-define both their socio-political function and the role of their work in society. It is now up to the true artist to reclaim their ancient craft from the machine brokers and instead of conscripting the work of art into the service of financial exchange are now being called upon to lead the revolution that reclaims humanity by restoring hope.
Given that the definition of what makes us human is the ability to create works of art using our opposable thumbs and the biological ability to shape breath into words, it stands to reason that art is the link between civilization and nature. We have instead abused that ability to separate human nature from the rest of nature and destroy the ecosystems and biodiversity that our existence depends upon. But it is also that very same link to nature that art embodies and which the algorithm can never replicate. The real value of a work of art is as a long term investment rooted in a symbolic current that cannot be translated into a fiscal value without incurring a loss. This symbolic value of art might best be compared with the value of a living tree in an age of climate crisis. The living tree sustains us with oxygen and with a positive carbon offset that cannot be reduced to the fiscal price of timber.
In a Post-Truth era in which language has been severed from meaning the only truths that we can trust are our cages of flesh and bone. Our bodies are not machines, our lives are not data and our fears should not be Capital. If nothing else, the pandemic re-minded us that we are linked to every single other human being, animal and plant on the planet by the air that we breath in and out. Our bodies cannot lie simply because we refuse to take the time, to give the space, to listen to what we are. It is the reason why Femen activists protest topless knowing that their nipples are forbidden on Facebook and Instagram. It is the reason why Just Stop Oil activists glued their flesh to works of art to protest against Climate Change and why Black Lives Matter!
“If we begin at once to break the bonds which bind us to nature, and devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and abstract form, we shall produce works which are mere decoration, which are suited to neckties or carpets. Beauty of Form and Colour is no sufficient aim by itself, despite the assertions of pure aesthetes or even of naturalists, who are obsessed with the idea of "beauty."[10] The art industry should never be confused with the work of art, any more than the church should be confused with spiritual faith. We build the village around the church and the church around the altar and the altar supports the icon or effigy which embodies the faith – art is the faith without which there would be no village.
The ability to speak is biological, the right to speak is political and having something to say cultural, but it takes more than a splash of Fucking Fabulous to be an artist ! The art of today is a sad and pathetic witness to a sad and pathetic age of humanity at war with itself in which culture has been shredded down to glitter and relegated to the casino floor. The art of today will be remembered as either the beginning of a new Dark Ages or optimistically the end of a Neo-Rococo era of mannerism.
The true power of art is that it is able to exist beyond the limits of language. It is only within this world of exception that language is able to be both opaque and transparent in which contradiction is the correct and only reading. Consider for instance the word “Untitled” that refers to nothing, means nothing, is devoid of signification and yet describes everything that art is supposed to be – Nothing, but infinitely more than Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. The spirit of the true artist manifests like Psilocybin mushrooms after a storm. The mushroom itself is only the fruit of a vast underground rhizomic network of mycelium that transforms rotting organic matter into a psychoactive fruit that induces psychoactive visions more powerful than the logic of language. I believe that these visions are in reality our socio-political-erotical-mystical DNA and it is the task of the artist to channel them into form and expression. The true artist stands a crossroads today, with the Zombie market behind them and a very difficult choice ahead. The artist must now choose between a comfortable acceleration into cultural genocide on the one side or else embrace the terrifying unprecedented challenge of transforming the stagnant Zombie Neo Liberal flesh into visionary expressions of what it means to be human in a Brave New World of social terror and digital despair.
Art Changes the World – One Perception at a Time !
- https://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184
- https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/how_i_collect/stefan_simchowitz_interview-52164
- Dean Kissick The rise of bad figurative painting, The Spectator, 30 January 2021, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-rise-of-bad-figurative-painting/
- https://www.vulture.com/2014/06/why-new-abstract-paintings-look-the-same.html
- https://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184
- Yuval Noah Harari, https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/04/28/yuval-noah-harari-argues-that-ai-has-hacked-the-operating-system-of-human-civilisation
- https://www.eldagsen.com/sony-world-photography-awards-2023/
- Bruce Nauman, 1967
- Arthur Rimbaud, Letter written to Paul Demeny 15 May 1871
- Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning The Spiritual In Art” (1911)
