Noam Youngrak Son ~ The School of Speculation
Noam Youngrak Son's "The School of Speculation" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 2, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.
Here you will find the documentation of Noam Youngrak Son's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.
The School of Speculation
Noam Youngrak Son's question: Art school? Finance? Speculate!? Future? Where? How? What?
Noam's introduction: This work is not an institutional critique of any existing art school. Rather, it is part of ongoing research about how the impact of financialization on the idea of futurity is expressed and experienced in art and design education. The performance, in the form of a corporate presentation, proposes a speculative art school whose main mission is financial speculation. How can creativity be taught when financialization “fundamentally reorients our sense of possibility and futurity,” as Randy Martin argues? What does it mean to speculate when financial speculation dominates speculative fabulation?
Bethany's report: The performance begins with the audience entering a space filled with dramatic music—an atmosphere that feels like a blend of a news broadcast and an epic fantasy adventure. On the stage, the screen glows bright green, displaying “Act 1” in bold text. At a desk in front of the screen, the performer sits with their laptop open, live-streaming themselves as they begin their presentation. The tone is humorously critical, inviting the audience into a satirical yet deeply reflective exploration of the intersections between art, education, and neoliberal economic frameworks.
The performer starts by discussing the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and the Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE), highlighting their interactions with funding structures, real estate pressures, and crowdfunding campaigns aimed at sustaining art schools in an increasingly precarious economy. They reference historical models like the Bauhaus in Dessau and introduce speculative proposals for art schools to create and maintain value under contemporary conditions. Using wit and irony, they dissect the gentrifying potential of artists, jokingly linking the rise of trendy hairstyles like the mullet to increased property values.
The performer weaves humor and critique, employing “meme knowledge” and absurd economic propositions to highlight how artists and cultural institutions are often instrumentalized in neoliberal systems. They introduce concepts like a mortgage loan system where art schools operate as banks and investment funds, demonstrating the absurdity of how “cool artist value” impacts markets. The language of corporate and neoliberal logic—buzzwords like “diversification” and “public engagement”—is compared to the biotech industry, likening the cultural production of artists to the commodification of GMO soybeans by Monsanto.
The stage shifts to green lighting, echoing the earlier brat green aesthetic. The performer sits on the floor with a microphone, pulling soybeans from their pocket while opening an envelope to reveal a script. The focus turns to the soybean as a metaphor for the instrumentalization and extraction of value within economic and cultural systems. They ask the audience to consider the perspective of the soybean, drawing parallels between the commodification of raw materials and the instrumentalization of art schools and cultural production.
The discussion broadens to include the logistics of attention economies, cultural extraction, and the larger systems of transport and distribution. Referencing Fred Moten and the transatlantic slave trade, the performer critiques the historical and contemporary trade of bodies, attention, and resources within global systems. They highlight the parallels between tokenism in cultural practice and finance, where abstract identities—queerness, Asianess, and other markers of difference—become tradable assets within capitalist frameworks.
The performer critiques the neoliberal co-option of identity, pointing to how marginalized identities are tokenized and converted into exchangeable value. These abstractions, they argue, become instrumentalized in the same way raw materials are extracted and traded. The performance crescendos with the symbolic mention of a missing avocado, where the performer was only able to access a stuffed toy avocado, due to the original avocado product lost in the logistics of transport due to delays at the Red Sea, underscoring how even the most banal commodities are caught in the larger web of extraction and economic systems.
Inti Guerrero: Inti began by expressing gratitude for the performance, acknowledging that he doesn’t typically approach art through ontological experiences. However, he found that this genre and format made perfect sense and was refreshing to engage with. He suggested that the work might benefit from delving deeper into structural critiques, particularly in relation to the European context—the crisis of art education systems, questions of ownership, and the interplay between capitalism and the remnants of social welfare states. He noted how art schools increasingly face pressures to own their buildings and navigate these economic realities.
Referencing historical and global examples, Inti mentioned the film and art school in Havana, which was founded during a revolutionary moment. He also recalled the discussions surrounding art education that took place over a decade ago, including debates at Manifesta in Cyprus in 2005. These discussions, often reflected in articles published on platforms like e-flux, arose from diverse contexts and were driven by a shared interest in education. He noted how some of these initiatives—such as an educational project organized at that time—ultimately failed or were canceled, coinciding with a broader shift in the art world toward an emphasis on the art object and its commodification. This shift, he suggested, marked a moment where resistance became increasingly difficult to sustain.
Inti highlighted the importance of materiality in art education, referencing the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) as an example where foundational thought takes precedence over pragmatism. For him, this reflects what art schools should aim to do: counteract the pressures of the art market rather than capitulate to them. He encouraged further exploration of the "avocado economy" mentioned in the performance, noting how the avocado, often associated with middle-class tastes, has become a marker of a homogenized global culture. He suggested expanding on this concept by situating it within the social and economic struggles of regions like Southeast Asia and Latin America, where agricultural practices are intertwined with histories of violence and exploitation, including slavery.
To deepen the critique, Inti proposed engaging with references like Andreas Siekmann, a German artist known for using infographics and visual languages to expose social structures and economic relationships. Siekmann appropriates design methodologies developed in 1920s Germany, originally used to dominate and mechanize the social body—a project that later contributed to the Holocaust. Inti reflected on the historical obsession with ordering the social body, a fixation that has persisted since that era.
He also referenced The Potosí Principle, a project exploring the interrelations of colonial extraction economies. Potosí, a key site in Bolivia where Spanish colonists extracted vast amounts of silver, became a lynchpin in Spain’s control over Asia, with its operations managed from Manila. Inti suggested this project as a valuable reference for mapping systems of economic and social interrelations, aligning with the performance’s interest in interrogating global frameworks of extraction and commodification.
In closing, Inti emphasized the value of exploring these historical and structural contexts to better understand the economic models at play in the performance. By drawing connections to art, history, and global struggles, the work could further illuminate the intersections of education, economy, and the commodification of culture.
Ramon Amaro: Ramon began by admitting that it was unexpectedly challenging for him as it brought back many memories for him. He shared a personal story about starting his PhD the same year that Mark Fisher passed away, a time when he knew little about the processes of late capitalism but was already grappling with grief. He reflected on how lucky he felt academically to be surrounded by fantastic thinkers and people, particularly Susan Schuppli, with whom he later had the privilege of working closely. He recounted a moment during his PhD exam when he was overwhelmed with nerves and left the room, convinced he couldn’t continue. In that vulnerable moment, he knocked on Marina Vishmidt’s door, and her encouragement gave him the strength to go back. This memory, he said, came to mind during the performance, reminding him of how the legacy of such people and their research lives on in presentations like this one.
Ramon appreciated the performance’s ability to engage with the abstraction of how languages of technology are derived. He noted how the work avoided being solely focused on the subjugation inherent in those languages but instead sought to rewrite them, identifying breaches that might lead to revelation or better ways of living. He saw echoes of this in his own work, particularly the suspension of assumptions that certain bodies are always relegated to certain spaces. The performance, he said, opened up questions about how we can find spaces to read and write these languages, reclaiming or recapturing value for the self.
He admired the way the discourse presented in the performance brought fresh energy to persistent and “sticky” problems—issues that seem resistant to resolution despite repeated engagement. Ramon noted that the refusal to give up on addressing the challenges of late-stage capitalism, even when everything suggests it might be easier to forget or surrender, was an act of defiance he deeply respected. He saw the performance as an intervention that pushed this discourse forward, offering an important reminder of its continued relevance.
Ramon also highlighted the performer’s use of irony and humor as a strategic entry point. He praised the creation of a persona that provided emotional distance, allowing the performer to inhabit a character without being consumed by the devastation of the issues they explored. This, he said, was an impressive talent and a smart strategy—one that he tries to teach others, as many struggle with connecting too directly to difficult issues, which can lead to overwhelming emotional fallout.
Ramon concluded by commending the performer’s intelligence in creating a necessary separation between the self and the performance—a move he described as “super smart” and often essential in navigating such spaces. He reflected on how the performance gestured toward broader questions about the role of the entrepreneurial artist, who reproduces the institution simply by reproducing themselves as an artist.
While acknowledging that this could only be briefly touched on in the performance, Ramon noted that the idea of creativity is deeply entangled with implicit presuppositions about the relationship between labor and value. He suggested that this dynamic doesn’t merely generalize creativity in terms of capital but also highlights the inescapable demands and baggage that come with this relationship. For Ramon, the performance opened up critical avenues for thinking about how artists engage with and resist these structures, providing a nuanced reflection on the intersections of creativity, labor, and institutional power.
Antonia Majaca: Antonia continued the reflection on the parallels between the performance the work of Marina Vishmidt, a friend and comrade who had been part of the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). Marina, she noted, was someone who deeply engaged with many of the topics explored in this presentation. Antonia referenced Marina’s book Speculation as a Mode of Production, which stems from her PhD research and offers valuable insights in relation to the themes of the performance. She also referenced Reproducing Autonomy, co-authored with Kerstin Stakemeier, which explores the intersections of theory, labor, and finance capitalism—issues central to the presentation’s critique.
Antonia brought particular attention to Marina’s essay "Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated: Social Practice as Business Model," published in e-flux journal. She quoted from the text, emphasizing its relevance to the performance:
"The cell-form of art is the entrepreneurial artist who reproduces the institution simply by reproducing herself as an artist. She is thus mimetic of the 'automatic subject' of value, which is self-reproducing as a social form once the presuppositions (for capital, private property and wage labor; for art, the institution of art) are in place….."
AEROPONIC ACTS 2024 ~ Chameleon Orbit
About Noam Youngrak Son