Provisional Global Snapshots

Tirdad Zolghadr

CA 101

A quick comparison of archetypes is sometimes helpful. When Leonardo da Vinci settled in Renaissance Venice, he worked as a military engineer, designing canal systems with a lock mechanism that is still in use today. Centuries later, deep in the asphyxiating mass of the industrial city, the historical avant-gardes were less hands-on than Da Vinci but all the more confident in theory and vision. They reimagined their towns with an arrogant hubris that Benjamin later described as a “destructive character,” one that would have appeared equally preposterous to Da Vinci as to ourselves. Though the cabin fever pathos did simmer down a bit, the hubris remained until the 1970s. Creative visitors to faraway locations were both preposterous and hands-on enough to try their hand at agriculture, infrastructure development, sniper training, literacy campaigns, and propaganda. Take those late-modern icons—the Situationist flaneurs with theirdérives andNew Babylons, or the 1970s cool cats lounging in the cast iron lofts of a deindustrialized lower Manhattan. Even they are far removed from contemporary art’s take on its urban environs.

Something shifted over the last decades of the twentieth century. In its self-image, the bohemian virtue of art may live on, but in real life, contemporary art (CA) went from being an upshot of wealth to a source of wealth in its own right. Today,CA is a capillary network of formal and self-run venues which together embody a highly specialized skill set, a fiercely competitive job market, a distinct “moral economy” of indeterminacy,1 and an asset in the ongoing race between competing metropolitan “engines of growth.”2

In terms of its politics,CA embodies a strong sense of “ontological liberalism” (I owe this term to Victoria Ivanova)—a liturgy of individual aspiration on all levels; cultural, sexual, intellectual, economic. In terms of habitus,CA no longer occupies a niche where the critical intelligentsia consort with wealthy patrons, but is comprised, rather, of a sprawling cosmopolitan constituency mirroring the deterritorialization of art production itself. Despite these commonalities, and others besides, what is all-important to the field is its insistence thatCA is not a field at all so much as a fluid assemblage of incommensurate communities of thought and action, beyond ideology or categorization.

Unnoticed values do tend to be the more tenacious ones. Wishful thinking aside, what are the really existing effects of our artscape within the cycles described in these pages? The metaphors are many. Artists are variously described as pioneers, parasites, a type of magical ointment, stalking horses, foot soldiers, shock troops, kamikaze pilots of urban renewal, revelers enjoying a last hurrah on the deck of theTitanic. Luckily, not all the terms for artists are quite as melodramatic. “Gentrification and the Artistic Dividend,” a 2014 study published in theJournal of the American Planning Association (issue no. 80), describes the impact of the fine arts as “benign” in comparison to film and advertising. As argued by Marco Clausen, to overs