El Capitalismo

Started reading my Art in America March issue today.  So far I've encountered the usual post-colonial, post-capitalist, post-this-and-thatsis writing criticizing and kvetching about all the “bourgeois white male European” stances; those that, let's face it, we will never get rid of because, hey, in the end, Art as we know it was invented by male white Europeans, and the paradigm will endure.

But this is neither here nor there. I get the “project” of trying to figure out how to integrate the history of other cultures, other races, and different genders into the amalgam of cultural production that for better or worse has its origins in, yes, white male Europe.

But again, this is neither here nor there.  Mostly, what has struck me this morning has been the more than usual (as of late) amount of ads for non-art related, high-end consumer goods permeating the magazine.  For instance, pages 2 and 3 (very expensive pages I bet, coming as they do right after the cover): a spread for Hermes

pp. 7 and 8: Saint Laurent

p.12: Van Cleef and Arpels (apparently and “Haute Joaillerie" at the place Vendôme in Paris which the likes of me will never enter)

 pp. 37 and 38: Lincoln Motor Company. 

… And this is as far as I have read this morning. 

As of last month, there weren't this many ads for “stuff” so up front in the magazine.  And there was a time when the only people advertising in art magazines were directly related with the production, exhibition, and sale of art; never of generic high-end consumer goods. 

As I've said, this is as far as I've read this morning.  But the contrast between the ideology of the people who write and edit these magazines with the advertising spreads that allow them to keep writing and editing always makes me pause. This is not a novel insight, and I know this is just a microcosm of the art world at large. In fact, this state of affairs is something “the art world at large” itself complains about constantly, even though it continues to operate within the same state of affairs it constantly criticizes.  

Call it hypocrisy, bad faith, blindness, sado-masochist dependence, or just what it really is: market forces generated precisely by the people kvetching about them.  It’s just something that makes the thousands of words emanating form this world, decrying this and that, feel rather empty. 

Viva El Capitalismo…