Until I move them to a local gallery, here’s a flicker set of scans of illustrations from the old (pre-1923) National Encylopaedia –

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rheaplex/sets/72157614306272022/

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=blue

The actor Patrick McGoohan has died, he was 80 years old. He appeared in everything from “Ice Station Zebra” to “Braveheart” but he was best known for his 1960s TV series “The Prisoner”, which
followed his starring role in the long-running spy drama “Danger Man”.

I would not hesitate to describe the best episodes of “The Prisoner” as art. McGoohan took his personal situation as a TV star trapped in a famous role and escaped it by holding a mirror up to the mid-20th Century global village. Largely concerned with the issue of personal freedom in a mediatised surveillance society, the series has only grown in relevance. DVDs of the series are easy to find, and if you can’t watch any others then at least watch “Free For All” (which satirises the media and the electoral process) and “Once Upon A Time” (which is a classic two-characters-in-a-room drama).

Damien Hirst’s diamond skull “For The Love Of God”, 2007, is owned fractionally by Hirst, his dealer and an anonymous investment group. As the monetary value of the work rises and falls, the value of the fraction of it owned by each investor in the work will rise and fall with it. Their values have proportion and relations.

It’s possible to imagine short selling, leveraging and other financial abstractions and transformations being applied to this value. The fact of their application might affect the monetary value of the work. And the monetary value of the work is in no small way part of the work aesthetically. The economics of the work reach into its aesthetics.

Ashley Bickerton’s “Le Art (Composition with Logos 2)”, 1987, is covered with a number of corporate logos. The recognizability and relevance of the logos is part of the aesthetics of the work. The work will change as the fortunes of the companies or their logos vary.

With both Hirst’s work and Bickerton’s there is still a physical artwork as the ground for the financial figures of the aesthetics of the piece. As with relational art, a more thorough dematerialization of the artwork (a greater primacy for its gross ideological rather than aesthetic principles) might require a greater physicality. Rather than a work of pure economic figures, the ground of a flea market (or its haute couture equivalent, an auction house) might be required.

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.

http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/09/29/lost-not-found-the-unnamed-sources/

The excellent Art Fag City blog comments on Marisa Olson’s contribution to the “Surf Clubs” debate. AFC agrees with some of what Marisa says, then comments –

I don’t understand why reposting material without attribution on a blog
should take the work out of circulation, or remove a pre-existing
narrative/economy.  Sure they carry a different authority when posted
by a well respected net artist, but this doesn’t negate their history,
nor is it any way distinctive from the mechanisms of other online
social networks.  After all, an influential DIGG member carries
authority too.

For me it is this ventriloquism, and the assumption that artists are somehow doing it better, that is part of the ethical and aesthetic problem of Surf Clubs. And if Surf Clubs are just an accurate representation of the means of production and social relations of Web 2.0, why are they so reliant on the artworld reputations of their contributors?

http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further/?p=908

The great fortean surrealist, performer, actor and theatre director Ken Campbell has died suddenly aged 66.

🙁

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010588.html

Whereas I would say the opposite: the problem with “hipsters” is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries.

I don’t resent web 2.0 kiddies doing what net.artists used to. I object to careerist net.artists using them as human shields.

Tom Moody is a talented New-York-based visual artist with a penchant for bitmap imagery. He can draw more expressively in Microsoft Paint than I can with a box of soft pastels, and his use of this skill in such a restrictive medium to pull in fine art and low culture references is good stuff. Solving the technical problems of representing the forms that society creates is what art is about.

Tom’s image work is an embodiment of the current forms and means of production of internet-based society. But, and this is crucial, it is phrased unavoidably in terms of art history and artistic production that mean it would fail as simple web illustration. It is too interesting and has too much internal complexity. It makes a context for itself. History, problem solving and interiority are anathema to the easy post-historical consumerist cool of Web 2.0.

Tom’s pixels-as-symbolic-form MS Paint drawings of graffitti, or of found image elements then mixed in with art-historical precedents, present the viewer and critic with work to do both visually and conceptually. They are vivid and timely images without being tricksy or issue-illustrating. These stand-alone pieces are where I feel the best of Tom’s work is. You can gain a lot of insight into contemporary culture by looking at them.