Difference between revisions of "From criticality to creativity: a Neoliberal word snake"

Revision as of 15:18, 19 March 2015

This investigatory attempt into the sphere of contemporary art and in close reference to emerging creative practices, i.e. crowdfunding, considers the conceptual textiles in which the older space for criticality has been slyly overcrowded with a more incorporated set of collocations rotate around the systemic enforced creativity. In current juncture, without the space of further outside to exercise our self-reflexivity, the aim of building up this glossary is to demarcate how we can still talk about criticality in current economic immanence. The idea is, the more variable the glossary can be, the bigger fissure it opens for us to re-empower the role of criticality and to navigate the intellectual direction in the neoliberal transit.

Creativity–Criticality

Creativity in criticality

In a Foucaultian ideal, criticality concerns with a sense of the making of a two-fold space: one creates an intellectual space outside of the domain where authorized knowledge is produced; though not as an action that performs power through judgment, one nevertheless inhabits within the space where ones critique is touch upon.^[1] As suggested above, criticality has to do with the action of making––a secularized substitute for creating. Therefore, a critical action implies a spatial creation. It is in this sense that the ontological agenda of creativity is a core factor within the composition of criticality.

Criticality in creativity

If taking the vintage point from creativity to look back its relationship with criticality, the latter serves as an internal impulse for the former, states once by Jan Verwoert as ‘vengefulness as muse’, which depicted Dostoyevsky’s conception of such bond, that: ‘the desire to take revenge (for an injury, a moment of humiliation, a painful criticism once received…) may be one of the most powerful driving forces behind the urge to write, to create, to make art.’^[2]

Creativity absorbs criticality

The financial capitalization and capturing of creativity via advertising slogans

By topping up the relationship denoted in last two statements, then we have a reciprocal relationship between criticality and creativity. Though such organic reciprocity has gradually been broken in the sense that creativity been utilized while criticality been substituted with other words and reinforced into the glossaries created and rotated around the financial capital. Such impulse has been made explicit, at least partially, in English artist Carey Young’s video Product Recall, where she lays in a psychoanalyst’s couch, recalling 20 some corporate slogans that rotate around ‘imagination’ or ‘inspiration’. This rhetorical control for consumers’ mnemonic system tellingly states the easily assimilate nature of creativity, while leaving its traditional counterpart, criticality, omitted.

The immanence of creativity

This is certainly true if keep an eye upon the reality that art is increasingly democratized to an extent that we now have unprecedented population to make art, to visit art and to consume art. While the productive force being neoliberalism, the urgent plead around this issue has been famously made by artist Anton Vidokle and curator Tirdad Zolghadr with a performative lecture entitled A Crime Against Art (Madrid Trial). They accused themselves of being the colluder with bourgeoisie in the form of court, that there’s no outside for criticality to stand––even they creatively putting themselves into judgment cannot escape the destiny of loosing the ‘ideological opposition’ in which the criticality-creativity bind operates, thus inevitably running into such ‘critical vacuum’, voiced from the lawyer of defense, Charles Esche. Here, the lost of free spaces for producing art renders criticality into the immanence of creativity.

Criticality–Risk

Criticality with unmanageable risk

The intellectual economy of criticality can be formulated as follows: ‘[criticality] acknowledges what it is risking without yet fully being able to articulate it’. That is to say, the criticality contains a sense of risk without being able to see its gestalt (since the utterer is inside, therefore at stake, therefore unmanageable.^[3] Before further on the exploration around the notion of risk, one now can rephrase the topological relation between criticality and creativity while abandoning the two terms: ‘Works of art are always the product of a risk [criticality] one has run, of an experience taken to its extreme limit [creativity], to the point where man can no longer go on’, writes Rilke.^[4]

Two different views on risk taking

Plato has it that the affective capability of art results the artist or poet being outlawed and banished from the citizenship. In such a historical context, the artistic utterance is always already risky. But now we have different idea between art making and its connection with risk. In an interview, Danish artist Michael Elmgreen from Elmgreen & Dragset once reflected about an artist friend of him, Dahn Vo. The description helps us to demarcate the role of the artist as well as the contour of currently market-boomed art world, reads: ‘Danh is an excellent poker player, very unsentimental in his approach to the game’, and he further reviews that ‘[the h]istorical facts as well as the present reality or even personal context are his instruments, the cards in his hand, and the rules of the game are set by the art world itself’.^[5] If one was taking such rhetorical acumen seriously, then the former correlative model of criticality-risk suggested earlier is no longer sufficient. Remember that the depth of risk is claimed to be unfathomable. Now, the formula would seem to be rewritten, since not only Elmgreen and his fellow artists, but also Isaac Julien once in Playtime (2014) uttered through the mouth of James Franco, playing an art adviser, that the practices in the art is ‘a game’. During the course of the transition from art making to game playing, the logic of art that once confronts with the rule but now seems to align itself towards financial game is explicit. More importantly, as the insurance market would broaden their potential clients, now the risk in art is under management. In other words, criticality can now be managed in the context of the financialized creative industry.

Risk–Faith

Risk management

Risk occurs to us as a calculable uncertainty though its factor not necessarily controllable. An efficient financial-capitalistic way to reduce it is by a Derridean play of differing and deferring, i.e. to package the debt as a product and sell it, twice and thrice and potentially ad infinitum. Its internal logic is to create more credit to support and cover the expense materialized by risk.

Faith–Credit

From the faith on criticality to the credit for creativity

In art and humanity, one keeps faithful to criticality according to what it has inscribed into the cultural logic. Such faith and faithfulness entails that one prevision a future in alignment with what has been done. Though in financial capitalism, it is artists’ credit plays an important role in order to maximize the resource for investing one’s production and reproduction. The task of faith now is to make the creditor believe what one capable of doing in advance, which suffice to the logic of funding rising, be it private or public, and more evident even when it comes to the more democratized form of funding alternatives. The key in neoliberal situation is to optimize your credibility, using it to undermine the critical situation that might be happening tomorrow. To be precise: risk, which means the decline of value in the future. Here, either speaking about risk or credibility, we are uttering on the ground of the temporality that has yet to come.

Credit–Debt

Credit and debt

The more credit one is gathering, the greater amount of debt and indebtedness one is accumulating. Credit and debt are in direct proportion. But why barely any one fear of gathering debt? Debt implies an aspect of monetary presence, indebtedness a symbolic exchange. The returning of debt can be postponed and delayed if credit gathered slightly ahead of it, whereas one can return their indebtedness by giving credit to the other. In the last analysis, as long as there’s no systemic inflation, a miracle of investment is true that one does not fear of debt as one constantly generate credit and accruing it with one’s creditors, a zero sum game into growth.

Credit–Interest

From disinterested pleasure to the pleasure generates interest

In the game of investment, the key is to gather interest (and lower the rate of interest as much as possible) based on one’s credibility.
Interest gathers investors that we refer as shareholders, whose investment returns in the form of share and its dividends or interest.
Such can be helpful for us to acquire different vocabulary to look into the aesthetic notion of interestedness. Though Agamben once talk about other kind of interest against Kantian notion of aesthetic disinterestedness. Via Artaud, Agamben maintained that it is the contagious character of art that made the authorities, say, Plato, banned art from the society in which they reign (or help to reign in Plato’s case). Therefore, we have another model of art with interestedness, without spectatorial distance but instead drawn from practitioner’s side. A triad: ‘threat–interest–practitioner’ replaced Kantian ‘pleasure–disinterest–beholder’.^[6]
If we follow above financial vocabulary, and inspect into such triad with the game of investment as idea in mind, an updated formula trickily goes like the mixture of above two: ‘pleasure–interest–consumer (as the term included the beholder and the practitioner)’, which is certainly the case for our neoliberal condition. Say, one may pleasurably, or at least less critical than ever, participate into contemporary art scenes either in its artistic-productive way or the visiting-reproductive mode, both of whom consumes creativity which already disentangled from its previous correlation with criticality.

1. ↑ Michel Foucault. ‘What is Critique?’ In The Politics of Truth. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. 1997. p. 46.
2. ↑ Jan Verwoert. ‘Vengefulness as muse.’ In Cookie! Berlin: Sternberg Press. 2014. p. 31.
3. ↑ Irit Rogoff. ‘What is a Theorist?’ In The State of Art Criticism. Edited by J. Elkins and M. Newman. New York: Routledge. 2008. p. 100.
4. ↑ Giorgio Agamben. ‘The Most Uncanny Thing.’ In The Man Without Content. California: Stanford University Press. 1999. p. 5.
5. ↑ Hilarie M. Sheets. ‘Inspired by an American Icon.’ New York Times 25 Sept. 2012: 13. Print.
6. ↑ Giorgio Agamben. ‘The Most Uncanny Thing.’ In The Man Without Content. California: Stanford University Press. 1999.