Vapid Virtues, Real Stakes: Diagnosis for Left Art Protocols
Ghalya's sketch will present and think through some of the arguments she raised in a recently published chapter entitled “Vapid Virtues, Real Stakes: Diagnosis for Left Art Protocols.” The paper pondered the following: While there is a stagnant politics of dissent in and as contemporary art that takes various forms of negation, it never amounts to either negative critique, infrastructural critique, or effective practice. Already identified as post-historical, pluralistic, post-negational: on what basis does dissent (or organizing) in contemporary art take place, as whom, and on behalf of whom? The dialectical relationship between art and capitalism is not resolved by the appearance and claims of either total exteriority (e.g., art is not the market, not the institution, the artist is free, etc.) or total interiority (e.g., we are all the market, we are all the institution). Contemporary art lacks the transformative impetus in the world not because of art’s uselessness, its autonomy, or because the market holds it hostage, but because it accrues value as it claims critical virtue and duplicitous autonomy at the same time. The diagnostic paradox may help us delve into art’s structural incapacities in current forms of so-called dissent, and see if there are other viable propositions. Short of a history of liberalism manifesting in contemporary art dissent—something we have little space to do—what would dissent (or organizing) in art, when grounded in Left commitments, be if not founded on templates of institutional critique as affirmative negation, liberal legalism, rights, and representation? Given contemporary art’s axiomatic indeterminacy and proliferation of “criticality” as the nominal rejection (“anti-") of capitalism, fascism, and communism, among other ills, how do we relocate the (future, even “as-if”) Left engagements in the art field? What forms and alliances could or should it produce, or would it leave contemporary art altogether, as some have enjoined?
