art & commerce
Artwork represents a material expression of intrinsic self-evidence, the wielding of power as evidence of the self’s existence.
Art — and its processes — stripped of self-definition becomes slave to commodity, the hollowing out of self-evidence for the haptic insurance of marketplace compatibility.
The Artist exists independently of the market’s material power: an arbiter between the metaphysical manifestations of material interactivity and the substitutive logic of market communication dressed up in passive commerce.
Art Form simultaneously reifies structural communications to make itself felt (not necessarily seen) — as though the artist holds the function of a mirror back unto the ontology of its very material condition — yet in its heuristic to be interpreted sets itself apart as a self-evidential logic.
The tragedy of Art in modern market systems is such that its material reality is it is denied the truth of its own self-evident logic. Commodification denies Art the power to define its own interpretative logic.
Commodification denies the Artist access to truth. When the commodification of communication itself becomes infused with — and haptically reified by — the processes of mass aestheticization, Art Form paradoxically becomes abstracted into the realm of artificial, subservient to a phenomenological reactionaryism commodified into a teleology reified by technology whose function is to commodify.
The artist that confuses the haptic response in their creative processes with these technological feedback mechanisms promotes the devaluation of their Art Form — among others — to accommodate a marketplace that rationalizes the consumer against its own interpretative logic.
If I post this on Instagram, my ideas become cheapened — not my own, but deformed into Instagram’s egoless expression of my words back into the ego of mass media.
If I post art work on Instagram, my Art becomes cheapened — not by my own hand, but by Instagram’s egoless expression of my ideas back into the power of mass media.
If I don’t post at all, my Art Form may as well remain invisible (and inaudible) — this is the paradoxical crux that fuels Instagram’s motive as cultural tastemaker. A signifier that champions the capital A Algorithm — one that has successfully defanged the artist of haptic feedback, trust in the self, belief in the truth.
