the Tomorrow

Dear Tiziana,

Firstly thanks for the analysis. It’s sharp and opinionated. It makes me wonder how widely your analysis is shared or, perhaps more to the point, how much your analysis of the situation (if shared) goes on to shape decision making in the cultural field.

I would say that we did indeed enter into a new era at the end of the 20th century. At some point around the late 1970s, the post-WW2 finished. The date 1979 is important — being the Iran Revolution and the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader the old imperial power of the United Kingdom — but other dates including the overthrow of Allende in 1973 and the internal collapse of socialism in Soviet Union and China in 1989 (The Tiananmen Square massacre was one of the key motivation in its capitalist reforms) are also all significant. Lets say that the failure of the Communist experiment from 1968 to its defeat in 1989 was the core change that occurred. By 1989, it was fully and undeniably clear that world of Marx, Lenin, Roosevelt and Brandt was over. The new era, called neoliberal in that it restored to prominence the old debt-based free trade system that had provoked the Communist experiment starting in 1848, is still with us. It’s hard to see it ending anytime soon, though we can perhaps begin to detect where it will crack apart when it goes.

Because we are living it, it is often difficult to characterise the neoliberal system. One thing though is relatively clear in that it created a new kind of protagonist that consolidated themselves in a new class that we can most easily call the neo-oligarchy. This is the class that were electrified by globalisation and feel able to grab the whole world it their hands, ideally by appropriating previously public goods. Importantly, this class is not based on a nationality, though it stil seeks to control land ownership. It is not even based so much on wealth per se (that would not be enough) but rather it draws its power through the control and manipulation of government, media and the representative democratic system. As a class, their common interests are not so great but they do want to be a small group, so as not to have to share too much and to simplify their internal dealings; and they want to ensure that they are distinguishable from the old middle class and the bourgeoisie. It is this class that most people now serve. It is historically noteworthy that oligarchy was also the form of power in the emerging colonial states in the early 19th century. Thus neo-liberalism can be understood as very close to the old liberalism from which it derives its inspiration.

For the art professionals, for the ‘we’ in your analysis, one of the main (often only) ways to carry out our intellectual work is to join the oligarch’s party (this is just as true for politicians, writers, economists and other opinion formers in society). The art world is lucky or sassy enough to have manoeuvred itself into a position where a small percentage of the oligarchy’s expropriated wealth is dispensed in its direction. We help to distinguish the oligarchy from the middle class by displaying their advanced taste and by adding some critical intellectual content or credibility. Oligarchs always appreciate their ‘fools’, or advisors who dare to tell them which way the wind is blowing out there in the rest of the world.

So far, I am totally with your analysis, except maybe I struggle a bit to relate it to broadly across the planet. Cheap flights haven’t arrived yet in South America or Africa. If you want to connect Indonesia to Brazil, you have to fly through Europe; even Egypt to Morocco is most convenient via Rome. So, the ‘dizzied we’ is largely limited to residents of the old colonial invaders and some of their client states within the EU or NAFTA. Though it is true that the art world is one of the ways Indonesians or Moroccans can most easily slip the leash of their given nationality. Yet what really intrigues me and where I value your analysis even more is in the latter part — the section where you say that this same “we” is no longer dizzy with excitement at the whole world nor is it satified by being the well nourished handmaidens of the global oligarchy. If this is true, which I hope, then things could get interesting.

You ask then how should we approach our intellectual work given that we are tiring of the oligarchic circus. I would answer that we could start by pointing out the structural conditions that keep contemporary art reproducing itself. We could indulge ourselves in some old fashioned institutional critique of the art world, These critics would have to be local and courageous, as you say. We cannot (yet) describe the system we live in at the global scale, but we can in specific conditions. Often it is easier to see it outside the smooth operations of western Europe and the USA. I am thinking of artists/designers like Burak Arikan who has worked on the interconnections of the oligarchies in Turkey or Erick Beltran who has done a similar job recently in Mexico City. The same analysis needs done in the states of the old colonial invaders; in China; in Nigeria and everywhere. This is a job for independent journalists, curators, writers as well as artists. It is a work that will be little rewarded initially I fear, that takes a long time and is not going to endear ‘us’ to the oligarchs very much (or only to a few).

How else could we approach our work? We could imagine disrupting things from inside the workings of the neoliberal machine. I am fascinated by how far we can twist the constitutions of museums for instance (my own main field) out of their tendency towards oligarchic control. In Europe, the public status of many museums derives from the old post-1945 social democratic settlement. These are rapidly being traded in for the greater security of oligarch funding. What if we started exploring other models? Museums as workers co-ops? As political associations? As public houses? Spending intellectual effort on restructuring the museum away from both state and oligarch culture can be a worthwhile trajectory to follow in my mind. Such work would again be local and specific, without having to declare itself so.

And that is perhaps where we differ. I am not sure that a self-declared love of the local will get us very far. The lessons of globalisation are that things are deeply interconnected. The local only exists as a field of action, not as a place apart — there isn’t even much unique about localities as the free trade agenda wishes to flatten difference as much as possible. So, we have to go on presenting the contemporary world AS the world — as the one world we still have to share, even the oligarchs. I think we need to be able to talk at this level in all our projects, to explain the relations between provincial backwaters and the imperial capitals on which the sun still hasn’t set but whose empires is measured in debt rather than land these days. To depict the world as it is, not as a series of isolated problems and injustices but as a system that functions in the interests of those we serve. We need to cover the land, sea and sky, and we need to go beyond criticality towards more propositional modes. We can transcend disciplines and borders in the process, while basing our claims on real situations. Ultimately, we need a bigger project than art can handle, but one to which it can align and contribute, as well as bring intellectuals together in a collective effort. I don’t know yet where that project is going to emerge but I know it has to break with statist solutions and left-right divisions. It’s a hard task to set ourselves, but I beleive it is the only one that makes much sense today. To achieve it would mean to abandon the art world as it exists today.

Yours aye,

Charles Esche