Art in the New Plutocracy

[C C]

http://chronicle.com/article/Art-in-the-...acy/235903

EXCERPT: In 2010, a cadre of muckraking activists, including the artist Andrea Fraser, started a project called Artigarchy. Their aim was to investigate the relationship between rising inequality and rising art prices, not merely to identify key individuals but to expose institutional relationships, for example between banks and museums. Artigarchy is a good term to think with. How do the institutions of the art world shape and actually harm society? In what ways are we ruled by art? [...] So what is the relationship between art and capital today? The continuing adventures of the hedge-fund billionaire and art collector Steven A. Cohen are instructive in this election season. [...] Art is no longer the mere status symbol it was in the age of Morgan. Instead, as Cohen’s exploits show, art has become an instrument for generating wealth and political influence in the interests of an audacious plutocracy. In this sense, we are indeed being ruled by art in a way we have not been before, and its price now comes at a direct social cost. Its commodification has ceased to be a matter merely of cultural debate [...] In an age when museums and banks increasingly resemble each other, we need a Pujo Committee to put art itself on trial....

[Magical Realist]

The whole perversion of art into a status symbol and a monetary-valued commodity irks me greatly. I doubt this is what true artists have in mind when they create their works. Art is really a anarchistic movement against the mainstream and status quo reality. It poses questions and provokes feelings that wake us up out of our socially imposed daze. Why it should have ever have been reduced to statements of opulance and wealth by the upper class is beyond me. They are told the art is great, and they buy it up to represent their fine taste and intelligence to the world. It isn't art. It's the garish pornography of the materialistic elite. It's art imprisoned and reappropriated into the service of prestige and ego-empowerment.