In the Flow by Boris Groys

Author:Boris Groys
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso 2016

The difficulty of imagining culture as situated ‘in the middle of work’ has its roots in the Romantic opposition between the artwork and the industrial product – an opposition that still informs Greenberg’s writing, even if he praises the avant-garde for shifting the attention of the spectator from the content of art to its technique, to its madeness. That is why he makes the somewhat counterintuitive assumption that only the ruling class, being excluded from the production process, has enough leisure time to contemplate and aesthetically appreciate the technical side of art. In fact, one would expect this kind of appreciation rather from the people that are immediately involved in the production of art. And, of course, the number of such people continued to increase during the unfolding of the modern age, and it has grown exponentially in recent times. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, art entered a new era –an era of mass artistic production that followed the era of mass art consumption. This developmental period has been variously described by influential theoreticians as the era of kitsch (Greenberg), the era of ‘culture industry’ (Adorno), and a society of spectacle (Debord). This was the era of art that was made for the masses – of art that wanted to seduce the masses, to be consumed by the masses. Today, the situation has changed, primarily through two developments. One of them is the emergence of new technical means of image production and distribution, and the other is a shift in our understanding of art, a change in the rules that are used for the identification of what is art and what is not art.

Let us begin with the second development. Today, we do not identify an artwork primarily as an object produced through manual work by an individual artist. Rather, an artwork is seen as an effect of the choosing, placing, shifting, transforming and combining of already existing images and objects. And that is, of course, precisely what hundreds of millions of people around the world are doing every day in the context of their everyday life. Of course, even after discoursing on the death of the author and deconstruction of subjectivity and intentionality, we tend to think that all these operations can be interpreted as art-generating only if they are originally dictated by an artistic project, by an aesthetic intention – and we also tend to assume that the masses do not have such an intention and that they only produce aesthetic effects ‘unconsciously’.

But today’s masses have been well informed about advanced art production through biennials, documents, and related media coverage – and, yes, they produce their art intentionally. Contemporary means of communication and social networks like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter make it possible for the global population to display their photos, videos and texts in such a way that they cannot be distinguished from any other post-Conceptualist artwork. And contemporary design makes it possible for the same population to

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