Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization

520 Pages·2017·34.29 MB·English

by  Max Haiven

Art After Money,
Money After Art T
Creative Strategies Against
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Financialization
Max Haiven
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[email protected]
Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice
Department of English, Lakehead University
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955 Oliver Rd, Thunder Bay,
Ontario, Canada - P7B 5E1
Forthcoming from Pluto Press,
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August 2018
This is an uncorrected early draft.
Please do not share or distribute with-
out permission.
Contents
Dedication xii
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Acknowledgements 13
Introduction 1
Financialization and the imagination 11
Imaginary money 15
A materialist theory of the imagination 17
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The best of enemies, the worst of friends 22
The money in art 24
The art in money 30
Why bother? Activist questions 35
Caveats toward abolition 44
Overview 49
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ONE: 3.5 artistic strategies to envision money’s mediation 56
Crises of representation 63
Money, abstraction and transformation 72
The art of money, the financialization of art, and a half-strategy 78
Strategy 1: Revelation 87
Strategy 2: Reflexivity R 91
On mediation 100
Strategy 3: Rendering labor visible 110
TWO: 6artists x 2 crises x 3 orders of reproduction 126
Three Theories of Reproduction 133
Circulation 134
Institutions 138
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Social life 143
Three artists, c.1973 148
Circulation: Beuys 150
Institutions: Haacke 157
Social life: Lee Lozano 167
Dawning Financialization 175
Derivatives 178
Neoliberalism 182
Cognitive capitalism 186
Three artists after financialization 191
Social life: geheimagentur 192
Institutions: Gough 200
Circulation: Güell and collaborators 206
Conclusion 213
THREE: 0 Participation: Benign pessimism, tactical parasitics and the encrypted common 218
You can’t give it away like you used to 222
Social practices 231
Cruel optimism 245
Benign Pessimism 254
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Superflex 254
Quantitative Easing (for the street) 262
Tactical Parasitics 267
Loophole for All 277
Robin Hood 281
The Encrypted Common F 286
Market for immaterial value 289
Give me cred 298
Conclusion 308
FOUR: ∞ Encryption: art’s crypt, securitization in numbers, derivative socialities 310
Part 1: Palaces of encryption 320
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The Cryptic MARKET 320
A financialized society of control 325
Art’s money crypt 331
The Palace of Encrypted Culture 342
Part 2: Art crypts money crypts art 352
Into the crypt 352
Art crypt R 359
Money crypt 369
Art/money crypt 377
Part 3. Decrypt 380
Popular unrest 380
Debtfair 403
Epilogue: Beyond crypto 426
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Conclusion: Toward abolitionist horizons 435
An abolitionist approach 438
Another reproduction 447
Beyond fascism 451
Art after money, money after art 461
Dedication
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Randy Martin,
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who danced with the derivative with militant optimism
and to my friends and former students and colleagues at
the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
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xii
Acknowledgements
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This book had its origins in the challenges I met striving
to teach critical theory and political economy at the Nova
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Scotia College of Art and Design, beginning in 2011,
which led me to seek out the work of contemporary art-
ists working with money as a medium of critical and cre-
ative expression. Along the wayA, it racked up many debts
indeed.
Thanks to various people who read and offered
feedback on various parts of this book, or with whom I
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conversed about its themes, though they may not have
known they were doing so at the time. They include
Franco Berardi, Jody Berland, Stephanie Boluk, Enda
Brophy, George Caffentzis, Carole Condé and Karl Bev-
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eridge, Jim Costanzo, Mark Curran, Greg Elmer, Ter-
aneh Fazeli, Silvia Federici, Zach Gough, Stefano Har-
ney, Brian Holmes, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Leigh
Claire La Berge, Carolyn Elerding, Noah Fischer, Baruch
Gottlieb, Dmytri Kleiner Marc James Léger, Suhail Ma-
lik, Miguel Marques, Randy Martin, Evan Mauro, Chris-
tian Nagler, Ahmet Ögüt, Rachel O'Dwyer, Martha
Rans, Renée Ridgway, Emily Rosamond, Oliver Lerone
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Schultz, Danny Spitzberg, AK Thompson, Brett Scott,
Imre Szeman, Tobias C. VanVeen. This book would not
have been possible without a long series of engagements
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with activists, artists and scholars made possible by the
hospitality of many comrades and colleagues, who in-
vited me to their communities or published work related
to this project. These includeA Krystian Woznicki and
Magdelena Taube of the Berliner Gazette, Geert Lovink,
Patricia De Vries, Inte Gloerich and everyone at the In-
stitute for Network Cultures and others associated with
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their Moneylab conference series, George Vassilacopou-
los and Toula Nicolacopoulos at La Trobe , Rui Matoso,
Sara Moreira, Paul Wittenbraker, Flo6x8, Heitor Alve-
los, Johnna Montogmerie and Clea Bourne at the Polit-
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ical Economic Research Centre at Goldsmiths, Alice
Meyer, Claire Wilkinson and Steven Connor at Cam-
bridge, Helmut Draxler, Nora Ní Mhurchú, Ned Ros-
siter, Lana Swartz and Michael Palm, Jörg Metelmann,
Daniel Cuonz and Scott Loren at St. Gallen, Angus
Cameron, Detlev Zwick, Stephanie Rothenburg,
Christpher Lee and Jordan Geiger at Buffalo, Taylor
Nelms and Bill Maurer at Irvine, Stevphen Shukaitis,
Daphne Dragona and Kristoffer Gansing at Trans-
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mediale, and the staff at the Halifax Public Library,
where I taught a class on Art and Money in 2015. And
no book, but especially this one, would be possible with-
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out the support of friends, including Phanuel Antwi,
Ezra Winton, Svetla Turnin, Ardath Whynacht, Alex
Khasnabish, Candida Hadley, Judy, Larry and Omri
Haiven. A
The project of which this book is a part was
funded in part through a grant from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in part
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through the Canada Research Chairs program. I am
deeply grateful for these forms of public support. Thanks
to my students, friends and colleagues at the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, especially the Art and Activ-
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ism collective (Karin Cope, Carla Taunton and Ericka
Walker) and to my colleagues at My colleagues at Lake-
head University in the Department of English and the
Social Justice Studies program. Special thanks to my re-
search assistant Diana Somuah Adu-Gyima.
I also want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all
the artists whose work is featured in this book and who
graciously allowed me to reproduce their images. I won’t
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name them here because they appear throughout the
book, though there were many more whose work we
could not include. One of the great joys of researching
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and writing this book has been meeting so many fasci-
nating and inspiring people.
Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in “Art and Money:
Three Aesthetic Strategies in anA Age of Financialisation”
in the journal Finance and Society in 2015. Parts of chap-
ter 3 appeared in “Participatory Art within, against and
beyond Financialization: Benign Pessimism, Tactical
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Parasitics and the Encrypted Common” in the journal
Cultural Studies in 2017. Parts of chapter 4 appeared in
‘The Crypt of Art, the Decryption of Money, the En-
crypted Common and the Problem of Cryptocurrencies’
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in the Moneylab Reader 2, edited by Inte Gloerich, Geert
Lovink, and Patricia De Vries.
Thanks to David Shulman and everyone at Pluto
for making this book a reality.
My greatest thanks go to Cassie Thornton, my favorite
artist and so much more.
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Introduction
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At the very outset let me assure the reader that I
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do not believe art needs to be saved from money’s undue
influence. Nor do I believe that money needs to be re-
formed to be more functional, rational and unambigu-
ous—which is to say, less like art. Rather, I think that
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money and art, as they exist under capitalism, must be
abolished, along with that economic system. And it is to-
ward the horizon of that abolition that this book is ori-
ented. But while you might not agree with that orienta-
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tion, it is my hope that any reader with an interest in the
relationship between art and money, and more broadly
with an interest in the relationship between culture and
economics, imagination and value, will find something
useful or at least provocative in the coming pages.
I am interested in what the work of visual, perfor-
mance and participatory artists who use money as a me-
dium or material for artistic intervention and expres-
sion—what I term “money-art”—can teach us about our
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particular moment of capitalism and how to overcome it.
With increasing regularity, critical, radical and experi-
mental artists have incorporated coins, banknotes, credit
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cards and more ephemeral money-like substances (debt,
blockchains, financial instruments, tax havens) into their
work in ways that can offer us insights into the system of
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which they (both the artists and the money) are a part.
Truth be told, most of this work is atrociously bad:
theoretically misinformed, conceptually lazy, technically
banal, politically confused anAd/or aesthetically boring.
But some of it is brilliant, and I think that the brilliant
work, which I focus on in this book, can illuminate the
darker contours of a system of global death and exploita-
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tion, the better that we might light our collective way out
of it.
Ultimately, then, this book uses money-art to help
me tell a story, or really a suite of short stories, about the
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relationship between culture and the economy in a time
when the line between the two is increasingly blurred.
These are not heartwarming stories about the capacity for
the heroic, transcendental imagination to vanquish the
crass materialistic profanity of money. Rather they are
stories about how radical artists respond to and work
through an evolving if chaotic form of capitalism, a sys-
tem of money’s rule over society, that actively and neces-
sarily incorporates, harnesses, recodes and commodifies
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