Jelena vesic-administration of aesthetics

Jelena Vesić: Administration of Aesthetics or On Undercurrents of Negotiating Artistic Jobs – Between Love and Money, Between Money and Love ...

Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (an artwork becomes an artwork only through the institutional art context/art world vs. real world; good example: Warhol's Brillo boxes:

• profane mass product vs. sacral art work
• production vs. creation
• mass production vs. authorship & originality

[Concept] art becomes an ideology: Gordan Djordevic, Serbian anti-artist from the 1970s)

Profane money vs. upper class valorization of creativity, aesthetics, spirit (business model of Freeze art fair)

-> low art vs. high art

Winckelmann, 18th century, idealist notion of art

• commercial art vs. free art
• Dutch golden age art vs. classical Greek art
• money, corruption of taste vs. good taste

Distinction introduced by art academies

• Joshua Reynolds, British painter, co-founder of the Royal Academy of Art, London (after the model of the French Royal Academy of painting)
• separation of decoration/crafts from art
• focus on authorship and originality to draw the line between high art and low craft

Both result in ideology of art:

• ideology of art as free labor, not wage labor
• romanticism of art as non-material labor
• class struggle in art (between low art and high art)

Today: two modern inventions

1. cultural industries;
2. project-based art practice

have replaced previous models of production;

replaces old arrangement of

1. high art; subsidized or commissioned (aristocratic in origin, taken over by the state)
2. commercial art; art production for individual taste (collector's market)
3. critical art: refusal of (a) and (b)

Project-based art:

abolishes traditional distinctions between artist, critic, curator etc. new apparatuses come into power

"tag cloud mentality […] shaped by the matrix of language"

Benjamin Buchloh (art critic of the journal "October"): notion of aesthetic administration = subversive appropriation of institutional modes of operation in conceptual art of 1960s and 1970s, also known as "institutional critique"

new forms of negotiations between the actors (in the project-based art field);

workers at the bottom: self-organized independent artists, curators, writers etc. - hired as freelancers/project workers by cultural institutions

informal, paralegal conversations and negotiations (in project-based art): real legal contractual agreement between actors is absent

hierarchy: those who invite; those who get invited.

non-serious classification of negotiations:

1. gentlemanic promenade talks

Silences business relations and social issues in the negotiation; money is not talked about. Work described in the language of play, love affair vs. banality of money and capitalism. Invited person has a privileged status of being economically independent / backed by institution / regular job.