An Excerpt Re: Freakonomics

 Reading from Pascal Gielen's book: Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World 

An essay: 

(By Gerald Raunig)

Page 168

"When the lack of depth in contemporary thinking is brought up in the art industry or magazines, this usually involves an old topos. The recurrent complaint about how superficial the world is, which facilitates a tendency to mediocrity, is nothing other than the dull repetition of a cultural- pessimistic figure, which persistently affirms the old elite or desires new elites. Yet there is no depth of the soul, no depth of the State anymore, and the dichotomous certainties of bourgeois society are becoming diffuse. The autonomous individual wallows in self-enslavement and machinic subservience, the State becomes an economic tool in an invisible global hand. 

…And even though more and more new political theories assert attributions of the public as being plural, agonistic or conflictual, this interpellation just as frequently fades away unheard. 

…Social cooperation, coordination and communication become central moments of valorization specifically in production processes. Whereas collaboration, negotiating common concerns, exposing oneself to the eyes of others, now tend to take place only in the area of work, the dimension of the public sphere is vanishing as a civil sphere of political agency.” 

Inspiring given the Freakonomics conversation, this excerpt seems to suggest that while the art market as we hear about it on the pod is exponentially fraught– and accelerating at algorithmic speed– it is fruitful to remind ourselves that the world at large is moving in such a way. While the artist and the arts fancy themselves outside in a transcendental sense, it can also be affirming to negate this antiquated stance. To see the world as an ever flattening soup in which we the artists are not immune to its currents can be fertile ground for imaginary intervention. My favorite artist and thinker Hito Steyerl seems to engage in this exact modality as evidenced by her video work ‘How Not to be Seen: A fucking Didactic.’ While this isn’t an optimistic view of the world, as the artist moves towards conversations of the now and seeks to intervene in a beautiful way (traditionally to uplift the soul of the commons), one must remind oneself that the infuriating nature of the podcast’s conversation and thus the art world is not deterministic, fatalistic or damning but rather symptomatic of our world at large.