Aesthetics, or, The Capitalist Production of Cultural Logic __

The Transfiguration of Objects

Capitalism is the corporal management of attitudes set and made standard practise under its
own manufactured conditions.

I. The Dead Flesh of Ouroboros:

Artists and their Art are deeply concerned with themselves. Not only do we take their
megalomania as a symptomatic corruption by the ideal goal set by the self-initiating
exploration searching for the sublime, but, conversely, their Art too has and now does only
ever exist in spite of itself. ​All Art is born to be itself.​ Yet how at this point, tethering on the
end of the history of Art, do such objects come to be conceived? The answer lies in what Art,
as it has come to be know distinct from ‘mere’ craft, has preoccupied itself with, namely, the
hysterical self-conscious questioning of its own existence and what it really means to be Art
and in what way. ​The very moment Art began to question itself with the infamous hysterical
insight “What is Art?” is the moment it began to dig its own grave. ​In short, Art has adopted
the appearance of the pathological Artist-as-Human who seeks nothing more than to try and
define itself. And if we take answers provided by the likes of Stirner, Hegel, or Lacan etc.
that the subject is nothing but a void - and if Art is only just a hysterical projection or
transference from the Artist - then the artobject too is nothing but a void. And quite rightly.
Contemporary Art has still yet to shake off the dominant and persistent artistic movement of
the 60’s; Conceptual Art. The artobject here is really only the many layered appearances
apprehensively masquerading its own void by way of shrouding itself with ideas or spooks.
In fact, so eager to disallow anyone from believing that Art is nothing, Artists frantically
inject too many concepts into the work that it reveals to us the ever more potent fact that what
they are hiding is literally just nothing itself. The eagerness to repress the secret is a sign of
the Artist's own acknowledgment - and cynical denial - of the void of the work itself. In
psychoanalytic terms, it could be seen as a self defense mechanism of Reaction Formation
which seeks to overemphasize what one or some thing is not in order to distract oneself and
others from what it ​is​. E.g. Homophobia could be a sign of one not coming to terms with their
own homosexual desire which they seek to repress in the form of attack against oneself and
(similar) others.
To reiterate, The History of Art has concerned itself with defining itself (subsequently
pushing forward what it is to define art in the name of ‘progress’), and Contemporary Artists
have taken what was once thought to be the end of Art - originating with Duchamp followed
by Warhol - and make it their biggest strength. The perpetual pushing forwards of what
defines art by creating non-art. Once thought to be a deficit and boundary of what Art can be,
thus putting some limit on what can be produced, Artists have now taken this limit, and the
perpetual breaching and extending of it, as their primary goal. The Artist of the 21st Century
is the Transgressive Artist. Yet this transgression itself has been capitalised into a moot,
flaccid and ultimately boring, myopic, bourgeois commodified fantasy. Artists of this sort
eternally create for themselves an infinitely regressing attempt at creating what shouldn't be
thought of as art (as thought of in their own terms). In fact they long for such a chance to be
captured and pinned to the ground, limited and confined so as to even have the motive for
acts of transgression. They need reasons for breaking a cage they wish they had. As David
Foster Wallace said about postmodernism: “i​rony being the song of the prisoner who’s come
to love his cage”, or better, “irony is the song of a bird whose come to love its cage”. Any
chance at being the champion who ruptures and break from the status quo. It seems now that
everybody wants to be the Architect and no one the builder.

II. The Anti-reification of Contemporary Art:

If reification is the process by which conceptual processes concretise into material objects
(e.g. The wedding ring is the concretised object of an abstract process - the wedding itself),
then the way Art is produced now is the reverse. It takes itself as an a priori artobject waiting
to be confirmed and validated and bestowed the title as such upon its very questioning of
itself. Just in the way an Exhibition might host “avant garde” or “Experimental” art - placing
non-art in a space ready to be reified into the status of an art object by way of its merely
being presented as itself (an answer exemplified by the Institutional Theory). ​The Art
questions itself into existence.​ What defines the artobject here is not in any of the qualities the
artobject might possess, but in the process which enables an object to be transfigured into an
artobject - It is this process we must explore.
In our attempt to think about what art is, we can no longer ignore the moments and ways in
which it is produced - the production of art (commodities?). With Art and Late Capitalism
increasingly intimate relationship, it's no wonder the production of art-making itself have
become at the forefront for what it means to be art.
Art has become self-conscious of itself. It is a reified product created only to be created,
produced only be be apart of a cycle of production. The artobject now, under the influence of
Late Capitalism and the Market, exists and is defined and valued solely on its very own
capacity for existing and being. In the only way the Market knows how, how we seperate,
distinguish, and categorise artobjects from each other is in terms of their revenue, status,
monetary value, and/or fame (The Indistinguishables alluded to by Danto). ‘Value’ can even
be hereditary. In once sense, ‘great’ art is produced only by ‘great’ artists. This means that
not only are there moments where the aesthetic joy given off by artobjects always has to be
traced back to ​some c​ reator or author, but, that ‘great’ artists are themselves produced from
the status and monetary value which their artwork has acquired.1 In fact, it is no longer

1
Yet a tautology emerges. Great Artists = Great Art, vice versa. To allude to one is always to confirm
the other. For if an artwork is ‘great’ by its being produced by a famous artist, and the artist is made
famous from the ‘great’ artwork, what comes first? Both! (and ‘great’ here refers to two slightly distinct
meanings as either applied to artist or artwork. The Artists is ‘great’ only by their ability to have
produced an object that has ticked the boxes of the artworld and followed the rules; the artwork is
great not only of its being deemed viable under a set of necessary criterias set by the artworld, but of
possible - if it ever has been - for a once heralded and championed artist of his time to ​no
longer p​ roduce work that is ​not ​art, or non-art. He/She may produce ​bad ​art, but this never
seems like a disqualification of what it ought to be for it be art. And yet, under Late
Capitalism, is this a surprise? If bad publicity is good publicity, then any bad art produced is
ultimately the successful route on towards being an artist if art is to be defined by its ability to
have fame, status and subsequently, monetary value. Is it any surprise then that a place like
Tate reveals once every year a series of ​bad artworks? Bad in the sense of knowingly causing
public upset under its own rubric of middlebrow transgression - eager and in anticipation of
the very publicity stunt that's used in order to up the ante and status of the work in question.
“​Quick, come look at all the Bad Art we are showing”, “Just look how terrible it all is!”.
Media Commentators storming in through the entrance lapping up all the delicious content to
booster their own ego wherein they are merely playing into the fantasy role of the puritan.
Capitalism interpellates us as brutish and puritanical in order to paradoxically keep us in
control from our selves whilst exposing us to its own transgression. At one and the same
time, the image of the people in the eyes of Capitalism is one of either the transgressive and
barbaric violent individuals, or, when it comes to culture, of that of the prudish lower class
philistine who doesn't know any better.
And all this remains so, however, for as long as we judge the quality of the artwork, its
artness, in terms solely of fame and monetary value.

The status any artwork achieves is through an anti-reification process of a very neatly
constructed Event. It is the Event which allows us to see anything in this circumstance as
becoming art. The Event is, in some respects, an ideological tool for propaganda used for
profit.

III. The Artistic Fallacy:

Under this logic of Contemporary Art, an Artistic Fallacy is born out of the consequence of
judging art only by its globility, recognition, status, fame, money and value is that we are no
longer able to discern the difference between what is art and what isn't. Now, although it is
my project that ​any object - whether created with intent or not - can have the capacity for
being art, this does not mean everything ​is ​art at one and the same time. And yet, under the
Capitalist criteria, what stops something such as the iPhone from being Art? The point is not
really to say iPhones ought to be considered Art but that this reveals yet another contradiction
and hypocrisy to the function of Capital by subverting what it appears to be providing on the

its ability to provoke an audience and create for itself an atmosphere or environment or Event in which
it is no longer even possible to consider the object in question as not art. Meaning, Its being so
transgressive allows itself to burst into the symbolic world to which it is very difficult to climb back.
Which means that the attempt to integrate the symbolic as intensely as possible is through the
production of a spectacle. In summary, The Artworld uses Transgression as means to producing a
spectacle that has quick and easy access to the Symbolic with which we then describe this process
as an Event. The artwork is its production. Art is the Event.
surface whilst secretly providing for itself new rules and regulations with which enables the
art world to secretly manage for themselves a set of criteria for what can be considered art (or
presented in a nice museum) by exploiting the system and the people who lose out (other
artists and its audience). It reveals and concludes and already known yet often ignored reality;
that an organisation as big as the artworld is running an exclusive club handing out vip
tickets. What this means is that in fact they don’t ​really ​care about transgression, they care
only for the objects which draws themselves profit, usually by providing provocative art, and
refer to this as that which can be only transgressive. It is a particular bourgeoisie
transgression that turns out to be a conservatism, by distancing themselves away from the
more trashy, punk/pop, filthy, ‘low’ transgression in favour of a middlebrow anarchy that is
all too concerned with the state of their own house after they trash it. It seems that from
institution to institution - Tate to Moma to Guggenheim and back again -, they hold for
themselves a private-language accessible to those who don't speak it and barred from ever
having the opportunity to learn it. The additional point is despite their agenda, they really
dont have for themselves a coherent system of curating artobjects. There is no criteria with
which they go by because it purposely is constricted, limited, and confined only to those who
they ​want to be apart of it. There is nothing anyone can ever do to allow themselves to join
the party because it is about controlling the heads within and without of that party. Art
Institutions are scouters, picking out and thus creating and forming (or manipulating) and
curating their own version of Art History. Yet the problem is not what a Institution has to do
in order to contribute to a history of Art, it's in the very way they conduct their methods to
how they contribute to history. And so there are two reasons why the iPhone isnt art under
their framework: 1. It wouldn't provide them with the type of Transgression and subsequent
audience provocation to produce the desired Event needed to validate it as art, and 2. That
they in fact hold to some degree a standard (orthodox) quality of Art using a list of mediums
and techniques we can count on our fingers; painting, sculpture, installation, performance etc.
- An iphone is neither one of these things. Not even a readymade. Which means, crucially
and maliciously, the production of the so called transgressive artobject is used only for the
purpose of capitalist exchange for those at the top. With no real care, trading art objects like
their trading cards in an attempt to satisfy themselves.

IV. The Incentives for Creating:

Why does one (begin to) create? Certainly not with the hope of ever getting enough money to
make a living from. And yet Young Artists are still nonetheless perfectly emulating the role
of the Successful Artist they most admire by producing mintaure simulacrums of their works
in hope they too may be discovered in a similar fashion. No single Artist - including all icons
of our contemporary age - started off with the belief or motivation to create as a means to get
rich and famous. It's not that Capitalism produces the incentive for creating art but that it
provides us with a map, a guide, a cookie-cutter shaped empty form, which expects us to
nicely and tightly fill ourselves in - follow the path to success - in order to be rewarded with
what it can offer. And as a result, all artistic production that aspires to traverse the same road
laid out by the Market/Capital slowly synchronises into a single, unified, frankensteinian
coagulation of dead matter made up of monotonous, boring, uncreating, bland, uninspiring,
insincere parts. Yet by saying this, what alternatives am I really proposing? To not follow the
path of the capitalist layed out with the assurance that this is the way towards their hopes,
dreams and aspirations? By condemning them to a life of poverty? No. Although this does
reveal the malign options Capitalism presents us with. Follow me and you can achieve Glory,
and if not, you're on your own kid and there's nothing you can do that will guarantee your
success because we simply won't allow it under ​your terms! ​What i​ s the incentive for
choosing your own path in a step towards creative sincerity if what artists get rewarded for
are works that are less and less uncreatively imaginative? Art is competitive, no doubt. But
what are the rules for competing? These are the criteria set by the artworld. As generally
conceived, it is not to create a technically brilliant drawing/painting/sculpture to be
considered as a ​necessary criteria to be art but instead for a work to transgress and redefine
itself as an art object. The more outrageous you can think to un-create art, the more likely you
are to create an object to which you wish to destroy straight away, to transgress once more.
Because the very moment you create art is the very moment it becomes canonised and no
longer transgressive. All contemporary art is historical. In a competition like this, why should
one bother to create a sincere and true to themselves artwork if one can be rewarded for doing
much less and much worse? What incentive other than pride keeps me going which sinks like
a ship in this economy? There's nothing to be proud over, says the face of Capitalism. In its
eyes we are the Hobbesian ideal of the brutish and nasty subject ready to terrorise and willing
to fight to the top. Yet this is nothing other than a fantasy projected onto us. Another empty
form is provided for us for us to fill so it can have the motivation and reason for keeping us at
bay - from invoking violence. It wants to protect us from ourselves by constraining us. This
empty form shows what we are and what we have to do to get out of this mess, to get out of
ourselves - the only way out is through capitalism, holding its hand.

V. The propaganda of The Museum: (And Whither Doest This Experience Cometh
From?)

The means provided by the Transfiguration of the Event (The Museum) is a production and
provider/host of a set of faux-aesthetic experiences received by its audience as genuine,
authentic, internalised and thus ‘authentically’ attributing any feeling to the objects under the
condition of the Event (Museum) itself. In other words, the ‘positive’ experience we may feel
from any given artobject is then not necessarily from the object itself but, in harsh terms,
manipulated and prescribed for us by the means or process of the hosting of the Event itself.
Because if we agree that the kinds of Art that make its way into the golden towers of
Institutions, it's not because of what the artobject is per se - its quality and artistic value - but
the very process into getting that once-upon-a-time non-art object into a process that leads to
its transfiguration by way of placing it in the very conditions of the Event itself - thus
allowing it to achieve its value. Which means, whatever feeling you may feel is not
necessarily from a projection of the artobject itself but from the apprehension of witnessing
and spectating the Event in which you are in and in which you play a key role. What this
entails or reveals is the possibility of being duped into associating quality to the work itself
rather than the Event which gave rise to it. ​For if the art object is in a Museum then it must be
genuine!
An example for this kind of trickery is in the way we react to Celebrities. Much like the
alchemical transformation of an object into an artobject, so too does the object of celebrity
have its own transfiguration formed from an Event. Just think of how one can go about
fooling a mass of people, along with their followers online, into believing one is a celebrity
by way of adopting the appropriate symbolic imagery - the stereotypes, the commodities, and
the attitude. The Event of ‘celebritizing’ yourself is what induces people into acquiring and
adopting the false belief and experience that you are a celebrity. Where celebrity was once
defined in terms of consensus and social recognition - lots of people knowing you. We now
only have to adopt the image of being already-known, already a valid celebrity, by wearing
its trademarks. For instance, walk into any shopping centre with some sunglasses, quality
high art street wear, a couple of bodyguards and even some friends to take your picture as
‘paparazzi’ or have them sign autographs - from this you will have made for yourself an
Event in which people can fall into and hook and invest their fantasies into. What's more, the
reason this works more than ever, much like the famous Contemporary artobjects, is because
of the growing self-aware ego of the individual who knows full well about the nature of the
Event. Just evident by the fact that they are constantly creating an Event of their own identity,
presenting themselves as something they long to be. And so, it's not that the fake-celebrity
itself, as object, who affects the hearts of those who wish to interact with a celebrity (maybe
some), but that people wants to be seen with the image of a celebrity for their own gain, for
their own solidification of their Event. And isn't this what Trend really is? A network of
Events being created with no discernible reality to them? The Instagram stars of the world
want only to appear to be in the presence of someone appearing to be a celebrity. A
matryoshka production of simulations. Debord is still more pertinent than ever when all that
matters is not to be, or to act, but to appear! At least he looks famous! Why else would this
artwork be in a museum?
The point to this is that those pleasurable aesthetic experiences we have - although real - are
really only the appearance or deferral of some other entirely different experience. And it is
the job of the Market to capitalise on this appearance by substituting the artificial Event for
the art object. Because they cant sell processes…
The question to all this is not in asking what ​is an art object or celebrity, but in ​how those
object came to be. It is not ​What is Art, b​ ut, ​What is the thing we call Art.

VI. Low Art, Pulp, Outsider Art, Transgression and the Clean Arsehole of the
Bourgeoise:
If High Art under capitalism is created in order to transgress itself - born out of its own
transgression, and if low art, pulp, outsider art etc are genres of art that seek to transgress the
status quo, - to be a reaction against High Art - do they then not contribute to the growing
tendencies of the fetishisation of the transgressive that capitalism capitalises on? Does it not
add to the continuing production of newness in hopes of only attating innovation for the sake
of innovation? No, I say. Because here there are two types of transgression. Or more
specifically, one real transgression and the other an subtle appearance used as a mask for
some underground standards or criteria.
What does a prude, a puritan, a fake middle class citizen, or the bourgeoisie member really do
when they transgress? In fact, being in the upper social sphere, what is there for them to
transgress? Because they ​are the status quo they have to transgress themselves. Yet in such a
way as to not dismantle the socius with which they rest on. And for reasons unknown why
there really is a split between Low/High Art, so too do they subscribe to a distinction of
Low/High Transgression. Thus, for instance, what ‘norm’ does the prude transgress? Having
Sex only after Marriage? Only with one woman? Only for conceiving? Only once a week?
No. Instead they use the mentality of transgression to give them the excuse of delighting
themselves in the appetites of lowly forms such as polygamy, cheating, roudyness etc with
the point of not being reduced to a low person who just pleases himself on these delights
anyhow. What distinguished them here, in the eyes of the upper class, is in the
acknowledgement of the very indulgence in the transgressive act itself. They don't just feed
off their “inner selfish” instincts. No, they have proper taste… or so they say. This reminds
me of a Joke by Zizek: ​“​about a group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity
in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am
nothing!” After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on
the chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!” After
this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God, I am
nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: “What
insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!”.​ The point here being
that only the upper class can get away with being dirt! To join in on the delights dined by the
working class without associating themselves with them.
Spilling some tea, not having coasters, eating whenever they like, wear anything they like,
never sleep, never rest, party all the time; these are there lowly indulgences. It becomes of no
surprise when we read stories that confirm the secret perversity of the prudish and the abusive
power of the Holy.
Real Transgression has no limits and conforms to no image, no identity. It is not a limit set by
a puritanical capitalism that giggles when it farts yet covers its senses when anything else
goes further. High Transgression is destroying your house with the worry of having to clean
up afterwards. True Transgression is the dirty arsehole in all its full back glory! Not the
squeaky clean arsehole of the Upper class.

Transgression under capitalism becomes traditionalism and made standard practice.