Category: Log

“Does ‘art audience’ today really only mean people who have an (economic) interest in the art world?” asks Elvia Wilk on Spike magazine. I concur with her thinking but have to argue that she didn’t dig deep enough. Reaching vanilla-art-audiences is common for projects which reject institutional protection and work against status quo (Unfortunately result from such encounters are seldom fruitful). The text makes an interesting observation on how artist deploy non-artist friends as resources:  “[…] if you hang out around art people long enough eventually you develop a taste for semi-mutually-exploitative collaboration.”. These processes are evident in the practice of artists like Outi Heiskanen and particularly her involvement with the Record Singers group and the “Bellinin akatemia”. Both group were dependent on non-artist collaborators.

Pietari shared a neat text: “Debt, neoliberalism and crisis: interview with Maurizio Lazzarato on the indebted condition” by Magnus Paulsen Hansen and Mathieu Charbonneau. In the article Maurizio Lazzarato discusses how the 2007–2008 crisis has influenced creditors and how tax-havens force debt to the working class:

“The power of debt in neoliberalism represents a highly efficient mechanism of control and capture, more efficient than the modes of resistance put in place by the workers’ movement. While the latter still focuses on dynamics located within the productive space, power is now exerted on a broader social scale. Hence, there is an asymmetry between capital and the forms of resistance.” “In reality, there is no crisis from the point of view of creditors as they are currently operating a second great appropriation by virtue of capturing the welfare state’s social wealth. […] the principle of redistribution has been preserved, but the direction of redistribution has been inverted.”