Mute magazine has a rigorous and nuanced mediation on art, value, and freedom by Daniel Spaulding and Nicole Demby. They endeavor to rethink the accepted relationship between art and capitalism, and urge readers to go beyond the simplistic binary that frames art as “either liberatory and subversive or uncritical captive of capital.” Here’s an excerpt:
What would it mean to see art not despite, but also without denying, these dynamic affiliations and recodings? Such nuanced vision would be capable of holding multiple registers of value in sight at once, and would beg us to situate our own investment or disinvestment in art without lapsing into a binary whereby art is either subversive and liberatory, or deviously captured beyond critical consideration. At the very least, in a moment when “freedom of speech” is being affirmed with renewed vigor, we should not unqualifiedly assumes art’s capacity “to speak truth to power, to question our cherished cultural norms and what we hold ‘sacred’,” but must instead consider the persistence of this ideal, and be vigilant in parsing its relationships to contemporary modalities of power.
Image: Joseph Beuys, “Kunst = KAPITAL” (1979). Via Mute Magazine.