Grown ups who get paid to sample big things

IT has a terrific mediation on curating, art, and contemporary mediality. Read the whole thing. And don't forget to check out her LA photos. Link: infinite thØught: the artworld is not the world.

Pick up any gallery catalogue, read the blurb stuck to any gallery wall and this conflation will come back to you: creativity is communication, and vice versa, and all is well in the world. Whilst there is no doubt a real immaterial practice that corresponds to the happy belief that creativity is communication, it is increasingly the case that the artworld simply is the unfolding of a series of ‘creative communications’ – and that it is in fact quite pleased to think of itself in this way.

...

By saying nothing at all, repeatedly and forcefully, you can wear your audience down much easier than by outright lying. It is easier to tire a room full of people out with junk syntax than it is to deliberately mislead. The opposition between lies and truth, between meaning and nonsense has been transcended. As Adorno puts it: ‘now nothing seems precisely the opposite of anything else’. Battles, political, artistic or philosophical, are no longer waged within language, which is precisely why we have so few meaningful debates. The hallmark of Nu-language is its inability to be refuted. If someone says something that doesn’t really make sense, it is impossible to oppose it, except to criticise the terms of the language itself. And how often can we turn round and say ‘I do not accept the very terms of your debate. Your language is all wrong!’ Nu-language is ideology without a counterpart, a battle waged at the level of the generic capacity to speak itself, a kind of amniotic fluid in which everyone exists and no one can escape.

This kind of language without referent, this endless demand to keep speaking without making sense is characteristic not only of the contemporary artworld, but of businesses, academia and politics, all of whom learn something from each other (if the freelance curator is the artworld’s paradigmatic immaterial labourer, then the management consultant is surely the business equivalent).

I'm reminded: not all communicative links are social links. Or not all communication is confined within one or more of the four discourses. Web links, tags, ads, streets, sidewalks, aisles, telephone lines, commodity exchanges, political ties, rules of a game, pings between raiding gamers, even, I think, familial links. This really isn't news, though, there are systems, after all.

But more in line with IT: nu-language sounds like the language of whatever beings.

Comments

[patrick j. mullins]

"But more in line with IT: nu-language sounds like the language of whatever beings."

Yes, by now theory people use nothing else. They claim to be writing about 'whatever being', but they are merely furthering it, are promoting it, because...what else is there?

More and more theorists are coming out of their art-ignorant and art-hating closets. This is a prime example of somebody writing about something they know nothing about.

[jom]

I agree with Patrick J. Mullins that scholars, specifically those who have capital from the academic institutions would simply and desperately resort to intellectual masturbation. On the other hand, if this nu-language can be seemingly accepted as such, don't you think that this is simply a liberal-democrat's elusive veil wherein its prime conditions allow the conflation of several images, texts until the immanent antagonisms start to deflate? Can we say that nu-language posits that resistance is seemingly impossible to exist?

[infinite thought]

Note: not against art, but against aspects of the art world. Those artists who similarly resist/resent the free-floating use of language in this sphere (Art and Language, Martha Rosler) are worth a million academic essays.

I don't think resistance is impossible, but nu-language makes the traditional language of resistance sound less and less like something that relates to a world outside - that's the problem.

[patrick j. mullins]

"Can we say that nu-language posits that resistance is seemingly impossible to exist?"

Prefectly said. But it is only a hypnotic, therefore very attractive to many who say they 'really' want to resist it. But nu-language does not prove such impossibility: It is exclusively for those who think it is necessary to 'want it' to greater or lesser degrees. But--as rotten apple--it may be impossible to want a 'practical amount' of it just to stay au courant--without contracting Eventual Full Rot.

No offense, dear Thought, but you need to have a greater command of traditional art before you can condemn it as elitist (which you indisputably do--you know, going to even the most nu-language-brochured art galleries will set you back approximately Zero Pounds; of course the bad news IS: You can listen to CD's of Prokofiev--yes, even during High Sovietism!--and watch DVD's of evil 'Rigoletto' and Soviet-era productions of 'Swan Lake', with filthy-rich singer-capitalists like Domingo and fabulously-mannered Soviet ballerinas like Galina Mezentseva--taken from British public libraries or university ones at no cost to anything but your OWN attention span!...that you haven't taken a single one of these out goes without saying....anyway, all that art at the galleries I see a great deal of, and it deals with the world to some degree just like everything else, given that it has 'shown up'...now whether it calls for immediate political resistance to all things crass I surely wouldn't know...)

[matt]

"But more in line with IT: nu-language sounds like the language of whatever beings"

Sounds like, maybe, but most definitely shouldn't be confused with...Surely Agamben is striving for something very different.!