Europe’s Post-democratic Era
Posted: November 10, 2011 Filed under: EU | Tags: Habermas, Post-democracy Leave a comment »The monopolisation of the EU by political elites risks reducing a sense of civic solidarity that’s crucial to the European project.
by Jürgen Habermas,
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 November 2011 18.07 GMT
In 1950, six nations (France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany and Luxembourg) met in Paris to consider a proposal for a European production plan for coal and steel that formed one of the union’s first steps. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
At European level, democratic institutions enter into a new constellation. One element involved in this is solidarity: once a constitutional community extends beyond the boundaries of a single state, solidarity among citizens who are willing to support each other should expand to keep pace with it. Read the rest of this entry »
Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy
Posted: June 8, 2011 Filed under: Aesthetics, Art & Politics | Tags: Post-democracy Leave a comment »Hito Steyerl
A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues in one way or another. But there is a much more interesting perspective: the politics of the field of art as a place of work.1 Simply look at what it does—not what it shows.
Amongst all other forms of art, fine art has been most closely linked to post-Fordist speculation, with bling, boom, and bust. Contemporary art is no unworldly discipline nestled away in some remote ivory tower. On the contrary, it is squarely placed in the neoliberal thick of things. We cannot dissociate the hype around contemporary art from the shock policies used to defibrillate slowing economies. Such hype embodies the affective dimension of global economies tied to ponzi schemes, credit addiction, and bygone bull markets. Contemporary art is a brand name without a brand, ready to be slapped onto almost anything, a quick face-lift touting the new creative imperative for places in need of an extreme makeover, the suspense of gambling combined with the stern pleasures of upper-class boarding school education, a licensed playground for a world confused and collapsed by dizzying deregulation. If contemporary art is the answer, the question is: How can capitalism be made more beautiful?
But contemporary art is not only about beauty. It is also about function. What is the function of art within disaster capitalism? Contemporary art feeds on the crumbs of a massive and widespread redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, conducted by means of an ongoing class struggle from above.2 It lends primordial accumulation a whiff of postconceptual razzmatazz. Additionally, its reach has grown much more decentralized—important hubs of art are no longer only located in the Western metropolis. Today, deconstructivist contemporary art museums pop up in any self-respecting autocracy. A country with human rights violations? Bring on the Gehry gallery! Read the rest of this entry »
