links: “Tes Yeux” “Pho Viet Huong” “Vzszhhzz” “Astro 5″ “Clifton Palace”
The mid oughts was the apogee of discourse’s infatuation with the mysterious as critical. 2007 and Huberman, writing against “information” decries art readily understood, that “To understand, then, signals the moment of having caught up with an artwork,”- i.e. the moment it dies - arguing a conceptual “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” and advocating an ideology ostensibly “against” the rigid order of category, and advocating a post-interpretation. It was something hot then too for artist’s websites to be labyrinths of unintelligibility.
2015, 186f Kepler releases press stating the liquidation of information’s category’s as more closely resembling the aqueous system of art, and it’s true, the Field of Cultural Production now looks less like the rigid markets of symbolic goods and more like a social systems of pedigree in which, as predicted by Deleuze, the postscript on society’s controls turns institutional interiors into dispersed system of self-policing and production, in which there no longer is an outside to market, your existence becomes the system of circulation for circles and scenes, seeking the endlessly theorized “network” of social capital. And here having CAD as your sandbox to immediately sediment your activity with visibility, you can do as little or much as desired, with enough accredited names attached you’ve got CAD to market your dispersion for you, becoming “of interest” simply by having been seen. 186f Kepler does in fact mirror and perform the social mechanism in which liquidation isn’t so much “escape” as marketing.
Relyea relates the dissonance:
“To take one particular example, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, curators of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, tried to credit such coy artist collectives as John Kelsey’s Bernadette Corporation and Reena Spaulings as having escaped the art system into a zone of freedom, “creating a space outside the market ... so that the artist isn’t directly accessible.” Their comments appeared the very week that the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the Spaulings gallery’s part in the pseudonymous fad, quoting Kelsey’s comment that “in part because of this “mystique around the collective,’ at a recent show works sold quickly.”Like attachment to any social network, the important thing isn't what you're doing, the job is to make sure you’re seen doing it.
See too : National Gallery at Grand Century