Going round in arts …
The arts market highly represents our ideas of a democracy and liberal democracies. The average artist usually strives enormously to find a place in this market and does not want to stand completely outside of its mechanisms of selection, to find himself/herself just making arts in a social space with no general interest to society […]
The question behind how that market for “society’s sense of aesthetics and imperative meaningfulness” really functions > on the level of “supply and demand” is not seriously discussed in the public sphere in terms of > markets and how they generate values and the how’s of consumerism of cultural goods.
With all that said, the masters of contemporary arts are basically something like “Volkskünstler”. They represent society in a one-to-one relation and reciprocity.
The structures that artists and their consumer-recipients simultaneously ostentatively claim to oppose: In reality one feeds on mechanisms of hierarchies, arbitrariness and materialism-as-instrumentalization.
And all that simply for the gain of having some shared aesthetical values, distinguishably cemented into society’s culture, by the people’s willingness to sacrifice their own authenticity.
The arbitrariness of the relation between the > value of arts > and the > values which translate into material “possession”, leaves the factual without any meaning.
Art is politics. Art makes up basic politics. But that does not mean that art necessarily has to be a superior magical driver of that what we commonly understand as political. It just means that the expression within arts and how one operates with these, as works of art, happens within and is part of the sphere of socially political components. Aesthetics can never be a detached field or one that categorically has to be beyond reproach.
Society does want to spare arts from serious critique, but in the end of the day at the same time they seek to use art as a credible tool and instrument of “making ‘our/their’ society better”. A highly contradictive act.
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rev 12.01.25