Art after Money, Money after Art
Creative Strategies against Financialization
We imagine that art and money are old enemies, but this myth actually reproduces a violent system of global capitalism and prevents us from imagining and building alternatives.
From the chaos unleashed by the ‘imaginary’ money in financial markets to the new forms of exploitation enabled by the ‘creative economy’ to the way art has become the plaything of the world’s plutocrats, our era of financialization demands that we question our romantic assumptions about art and money. By exploring the way contemporary artists engage with cash, debt, and credit, Haiven identifies and assesses a range of creative strategies for mocking, sabotaging, exiting, decrypting, and hacking capitalism today.
Written for artists, activists, and scholars, this book makes an urgent call to unleash the power of the radical imagination by any media necessary.
Praise
Perhaps the most theoretically creative radical thinker of the moment.
– David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years
Daring, brilliant, provocative. At last a radical critique of the crypto-approach and an abolitionist approach to the problem of money and art.
– Franco Berardi, philosopher, author of Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility
Contents
| Figures | |
| Dedication | |
| Acknowledgements | |
| Introduction | |
| Financialization and the imagination | |
| The best of enemies, the worst of friends | |
| Why bother? Activist questions | |
| Caveats toward abolition | |
| Overview | |
| Part 1 | Artistic strategies to envision money’s mediation |
| Crises of representation | |
| Money, abstraction and transformation | |
| The art of money, the financialization of art, and half-strategy | |
| Strategy 1: Revelation | |
| Strategy 2: Reflexivity | |
| On mediation | |
| Strategy 3: Rendering labor visible | |
| Part 2 | Artists x 2 crises x 3 orders of reproduction |
| Three theories of reproduction | |
| Three artists, c.1973 | |
| Dawning financialization | |
| Three artists after financialization | |
| Conclusion | |
| Part 3 | Participation: Benign pessimism, tactical parasitics and the encrypted common |
| You can’t give it away like you used to | |
| Social practices | |
| Cruel optimism | |
| Benign pessimism | |
| Tactical parasitics | |
| The encrypted common | |
| Conclusion | |
| Part 4 | Encryption: Art’s crypt, securitization in numbers, derivative socialities |
| The cryptic market | |
| A financialized society of control | |
| Freeport empire | |
| Palaces of encrypted culture | |
| A crypt within a crypt | |
| Popular Unrest | |
| Derivative sociality | |
| Debtfair | |
| Epilogue: Beyond crypto | |
| Conclusion | Toward abolitionist horizons |
| An abolitionist approach | |
| Another reproduction | |
| Beyond fascism | |
| Art after money, money after art | |
| Notes | |
| Index |
