AGORAS/MENOS
A project on the contemporary artist and the market
AGORAS/MENOS project aims to research and discuss the relation between contemporary artist and the market. It begun with a series of conversations and a collection of texts about the subject that were gathered in the group’s blog. Its next step is the AGORAS/MENOS exhibition that takes place in CHEAPART during April of 2011.
Art is a prisoner of its phantasms and its function as magic;
it hangs on our bourgeois walls as a sign of power, it flickers along the peripeties of our history like a shadow play but is it artistic?
Marcel Broodthaers
In 1978 Daniel Bell, a conservative American sociologist, accuses contemporary art, and especially modernism, of being a direct enemy of the upper class and an attacking agent against the bourgeois notion of the world and the capitalism itself. From the other hand, at the very same time, Donald Judd artist and theorist, one of the leading figures of the minimalism movement express his deep concern about how art could make it through private interests and the market. The immoral world of businessthrough sponsorships and any other kind of support had already started to raid into art’s territory.
Today, only some decades afterwards, Judd’s fears seem to be validated. The threatening disruptiveness of art that got Bell anxious wasn’t effective enough and the omnivorous market laws gained domination through the art scenery. In a society where every relation has its price the art work is considered as one more consumption product while aesthetic values have been completely replaced by economic ones. The world of art a driving force of culture par’ excellence – has been the center of money and conscience laundering while the artistic talent is qualified or/and constructed by how much is being paid. Hence, the basic problem that arises here and that we try to examine with this project is the position and prospects of the contemporary artist facing this materialistic reality.
Gelly Grindaki, Curator
According to one opinion, money and what we call 'the market' exercise complete power over human activities. Art and the cultural product is surely no exception, nor are the producers of these products, the artists. It is true that the market’s mechanisms have prevailed over the production and mediation (through collectors, gallery owners, art critics, etc) of the meaning of art, to such an extent that they partially cancel out artists and art itself. Moreover, works of art are used in a variety of ideological and financial 'transactions', such as money laundering, proof of social service, elevation of social status for politicians, industrialists, mayors, etc, being utilized as a 'contract of forgiveness' for their dubious journeys. Thus, the works of art become the means of production for their at will ideological mechanisms, which sculpt a wide spectrum of notions, from the perception of history for the common man to the sense of what art is for schoolkids. Often, a work of art is constructed and rises to prominence through various such mechanisms and not through a social journey – the same goes for its meaning. The institutes or art fairs, galleries, collectors, museums, biannuals and auction houses smother and manipulate both art and artists. Active participants in this process, sometimes even protagonists, are the artists themselves. Another opinion suggests that there is no other way, that this is the way things have always been and that the work of art, in some magical way, remains unaffected by this route because it has its own essence that is beyond any mechanism whatsoever. We are obliged to think and act upon these ides, suggesting – through works of art, discussions and literature – ways to challenge or even revoke them, setting in this way our position in this landscape of atrocity.
Dimitris Halatsis, Artist
Participating artists: Elena Akyla, Andonis Volanakis, Stephanos Kamaris, Giorgos Lagoudianakis, Maria Nyfoudi, Monica Pavlechova, Tzanis Rafailidou, Mark van Yetter, Dimitris Halatsis.
Curated by: Gelly Grindaki, Dimitris Halatsis
agorasmenos.wordpress.com
Performance Dimitris Halatsis - Fetich