April 19 at the DAI auditorium: BRIAN HOLMES: Mirror, Mirror: Art and the 1 Percent / Followed by a discussion with Charles Esche
19 April 2012 - at 8 pm - location: DAI
"At what price do subjects speak the truth about themselves?" asked Michel Foucault. The answer, when it is articulated according to the rules of the knowledge-based economy, defines the contradictory field of social relations that neoliberal cultural institutions have produced, in arying forms from country to country. Focusing on the relation between expressive practices and the increasingly financialized art market over the last thirty years, this lecture explores the space of tension that characterizes a hegemony. The apparent plasticity of self-reflexive identities transforming themselves through experiments with recombinant media is not only captured by the gallery-magazine-museum circuit, but also tracked and evaluated by sophisticated data-aggregators such as ArtPrice.com. A 2008 film entitled Je Veux Voir (I Want to See), by Lebanese artists Joanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, dramatizes the violence of the crisis that now appears to have broken the institutional mirror where the debt-ridden and increasingly precarious middle classes saw themselves reflected in the gaze of the transnational elites. The question is whether, and on what basis, new institutions can be forged, able to articulate the energies, problematics and memories of resistant subjects in historical time and across global space, without reductive valuations or exclusive hierarchizations.
Brian Holmes was invited in the context of two ongoing projects at the DAI :