@spitzenprodukte: the finest products

PRESENTATION Wherever it’s exhibited, the artwork coexists today with the commodity in a permanent promiscuity, physical and symbolic. What is called the “context” is nothing but the grey zone of this cohabitation and this confusion. The use value of concepts and images has shrunken dramatically as their value of exchange has grown nonsensically inside the art-world.
The predominantly commercial places such as art fairs have been rehabilitated and successfully promoted as simple occasions for the public to view contemporary art.
On the other hand, the non-commercial life of the artwork is supposed to only evolve in the space of its regulated reception. Children and people in general according to international governmental strategies need to be put in touch with contemporary art as if it was something healthy or therapeutic.
After being an omnipresent topic of the avant-garde, the movements of the Seventies and the whole philosophy of the Twentieth century, life as a political problem has become an embarrassment for artists. Since then it has settled in the territory of the moving image and populates the documentary and fiction films, as if the encounter with the material world threatened it. If the purpose of art is no longer to construct or to depict possible worlds it’s because this task has been fully taken over by industry and television. Art has to address the viewer, this unknown subject that nevertheless must be taken into account.
Commercial democracy has engendered the hybrid figure of the client-user-citizen whose function is to claim what he has paid for. Now a paradoxical situation has been reached where if anyone from a public service, transport or school, has the necessity to go on strike in order to get his demands taken into account, the government can object that the strikers hold the population hostage and cause economic damage. Looking at this phenomenon from another perspective, the worker is now racketed by this new figure that pays for its rights and considers any form of struggle as an attempt against the law, whereas the law is nothing but the result of many struggles. The artist as part of the fabric of the same economy is in a similar situation, he cannot forget at any time that his work is a “sociable creature”.
In What is the act of creation? Deleuze ends the text by quoting Paul Klee: artists do their work for the people that are missing, never for an audience that already exist. And the artwork whilst it creates its audience, it creates the people that didn’t exist beforehand. The artwork is cited by Deleuze as a device of subjectivation for the viewer and not as a controlled pedagogical instrument. It’s conceived as a de-civilizing and liberating tool of revolt and not as an element of civic education.
The starting point of our discussion will be the enforced proximity between the artist and his public, the public of buyers and sellers, the public of spectators. The consequences of this promiscuity are numerous but we would like to analyze them from the perspective of the artist and not from the sociological one. The continuous oscillation between seduction and self-censorship, the implicit work of re-formatting the art to make it compatible to the context and the necessity of self-inscription in a field where the critics are more and more absent, will be some of the points.
Of course one can object that artists are not forced to submit to these obligations and we can all agree on this fact, but what we call an artist today is somebody that performs these duties. Nobody knows anything about the others.

Claire Fontaine, 2009