The fiends of commerce smile

"The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies," special issue of REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 2019

2016

Another Art World, Part 2: Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value, 2019

Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber, in contemplating the relationship between the art world and industrialism, pick apart the lingering specter of the individual “genius” in contemporary art narratives. Even though institutional nods to artists from groups that have been historically left out of this classification may appear to signal a return to a collective focus, Dubrovsky and Graeber insist that a preoccupation with individual artists’ particular identities and biographies still boils down to a continuation of vertical Romanticism. The two writers look at the larger constellation of mega-exhibitions, pointing out the absurdity in each of these trying to be its own historic event. These “historic events,” they contend, aim to expand notions of contemporary art, leaving the whole field a constellation of rules and meta-rules.

International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction, 2008

Art & the Public Sphere, 2017

Anthropology & Materialism, 2019

Culture of the Slow (Osbaldiston, N. ed) 2013, 2013

This paper starts by a reappraisal of the work of heterodox economist Tibor Scitovsky. Scitovsky considers that the economy has been organized as to boost a tradeoff between comfort (i.e. goods that save time, effort and skill) and pleasure (i.e. goods that promote creativity, require time and enrich one’s own faculties). He also envisages a possible conflict between standardized goods which provide novelty by obsolescence and individualized pleasure which may grow slowly as consumption competences develop in a free, non- commercialized fashion. Finally he posits an insidious gap between generalized knowledge which is needed for everyday consumption and specialized skills which are required in the work environment. Ultimately I critically draw on Scitovsky’s discussion and explores the dualities of comfort versus pleasure, standardization versus individualization, generalized versus specialized knowledge to develop a critical position in favour of slowness and embeddedness within the current debates about alternative ways of consuming.

Beyond the well-known idiom of Warhol’s original and copy, I would like to articulate my presentation around the necessity to produce the mass’ image in artistic point of view. Whether in serigraphy or film portrait, there’s always this background surface problematic which connect the different mediums in their very own constitution. Warhol’s artistic leanings in the pop gesture’s frame will be displayed from his artistic learning process when he was a publicist designer. From the David Hockney’s thought who suggest that « drawing teach to look and the more you draw, better you see », we’ll see how the line’s outline works for the artist, images which go beyond the publicist model’s in effect. This starting point will allow to connect with the visual design by taking some motives or « pattern » as significative example of his art. The Marie Menken’s movie and impressionist portrait of the working artist, Andy Warhol (1965), will be a precious reference point for our thoughts. This experimental movie mentions the acting serigraphy’s question, its in situ process and its sharing in collective tasks. In which way, the repeated gesture summon the ghost of image’s death. How drawing stylisation erase in their repeated reproductions with mechanic systems as a copy machine (Mao, 1972)? To conclude, I will put back this thought in those terms: in which way the drawing become the strategy key to understand the mass’s culture problematic in the sixties? From the summoned medium’s plurality, how can we demonstrate that Warhol put the Factory to the test of the capitalism as many (visible face) as art’s location (reality’s utopia to perform)? I would be then by the Adorno’s advises (Aesthetic Theory, 1970), “an art truth" where the form remain an essential problem within an art’s serial organization.