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The vogue of the antagonist villain artist, stemming from the myth of art's transgressive potential, nullifies the question of art's utility, protecting artists from messy question of art measured for its good or usefulness. Implicitly Art believes Ethics would void the frivolous nature of art by placing in the mud of the material world and sobering its ether high of beauty. Art would like to remain judged as art, and even Art's greatest love, politics, still voids its ethics by staging politics in the realm of poetics, destroying its link to material political conditions while still using its signs. [See Walid Raad and Trevor Paglen for two examples of a wildly different quality.] Both the villain and political artist maintain a deflective Irony dome, shooting down inquests into the artist's moral accountability. That the villain artist's defenses reflect Empire's only bolsters his/her position, while the political artist downplays this. Both throw candy to their critic by "raising questions," by maintaining an indefinite relation to their signs. See the overuse of the word problematizes. The do-gooder however can't claim irony on doing good; like, you can't do good ironically. The gesture is never in question as to its intent. Anyway, Abu Hamdan did good, a problem for art.
See too: Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures
