Today 01:20
For years, in the relative calm before the hurricane, we lived with the unsettling sense of impending disaster. The calm before the collapse? Not necessarily. Under the carpet of the old normal, marked by the crisis of distinction between the cultural, the natural and the technological, a whole series of contradictions and failures had accumulated. Silently, configurations were emerging that these old keys of modern interpretation, accustomed to clear and sharp distinctions, could not decipher: the spread of GMOs, digital disruption, drone wars, the climate crisis, refugee flows, the return of authoritarian leaders and the expansion of social precarity, among many other contemporary phenomena.
In moments of crisis, art and thought redouble their efforts in their constant attempt to make visible the phenomena that stand at the edge of the horizon of experience. Art seeks spaces for its practices through emerging socializing platforms and new methods of digital circulation, such as non-fungible token markets enabled by blockchain technology. Given the growing importance of the prosumer as a creator of cultural content in an often precarious and freelance battlefield, it is also forced to redefine its scope of action and its systems of legitimacy. The dispute between “great art” and popular art finds a new formulation in the concept “Make Art not OC”. The radical democratization of platforms has led to a major crisis in the idea of the artist-creator as an exceptional individual; The proliferation of artistic collectives that blur the line between activism and art often implicitly challenges the idea that art is an autonomous field and suggests the primacy of political intentions over aesthetic and conceptual value. We are experiencing the rise of the idea of identity as a guiding factor in new forms of artistic expression; This “decolonization” of sensibility carries the risk of relegitimizing the essentialist positions that the Western world has worked so hard to dismantle. On the verge of technological acceleration, we are facing the emergence of artificial intelligences as an autonomous creative tool: empowered by 3D printing and robotic carving techniques, they raise the question of “art in the age of technological generativity” and a troubling puzzle regarding the concept of authorship.
This world of new configurations came into clear expression with the advent of the pandemic and the various social experiments that enabled mass quarantines and telework, monetary heterodoxy and security orthodoxy, a healthcare revolution and the anti-vaccine response. A pandemic that brought all the crises we mentioned to the table and caused many other accelerations of previous processes. A new normal that was already felt, but which was clearly accelerated by the side effects of Covid-19.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
In this context, it is no coincidence that the concept of the new normal, coined by Benjamin Bratton, one of the authors of this chapbook, emerged before the pandemic. Digital disruption and the climate crisis are also affected. The same applies to the perception – and reality – of the climate crisis. And to the concept of the Anthropocene, understood as a geological era characterized by the energy released by human life as a major determinant on Earth, by a modernization and development impulse so great that it would have radically changed the climate.
Likewise, we can reflect on the virus era that opened 2020. Although the scale and global scope of the pandemic represents a historic milestone, it is not the first time it has happened, nor will it be the last. But Covid-19 not only accelerated previous processes, but also showed us the power of non-human forces over us, whose power is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. We have lived through an era of great mutations, but it all seems to be due to the perception of these changes and their speed. The various texts by artists and thinkers involved in this volume provide an account of this changing and transitional world.
The origin of this book was the Third Conference on Art and Aesthetics entitled “Failures and Limits. Disruption and Precarity in Art and Contemporary Thought” that we organized in November 2022 from the Art Center of the University of Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT), an international symposium that brought together an exceptional group of thinkers, writers and artists for two days at the Alcorta campus of the UTDT, at the same time viewable via Zoom-live webinar.
*/**Author of Is there anything that isn’t in crisis? SXXI Editors (Fragment).