Deshawn:

I don’t understand your critique. Capital now is no different than it has been for, like, 500 years: it is power and minimizes differences between people and objects. It doesn’t obfuscate reality; it invades reality and reshapes relations. That is reality. Capital is a material fact. When Marx talks about “a materialist conception of history” he’s talking in part about the construction of social relations as a material fact in the world. It’s not by mere illusion that Capitalism can subsume everything it comes into contact with.

NG is right, though I suppose you might agree with him, if only in part: the idea of something called art, separated from the human domain and elevated to be something for people, is an effect of the current constitution of social relations. It can’t save people and doesn’t really have any use in the world. Art will never, under any conditions, do as much good as a vaccine, as food and shelter, as clean water, as the invention of written language and mathematics, as a technology like the wheel or the hydraulic cylinder, and so on and so on.

And art takes on the symptoms of whatever state of relations humans live in. In an autocracy it is autocratic, theocratic in a theocracy, totalitarian under totalitarianism, etc. For us, right now, it is a commodity among many, meaning that its purpose is to be consumed by collectors and gallery goers and the public at large. The expectation for a Coke is that its image will be enjoyed and its flavor will be savored. We are expected to respond to art by identifying it, categorizing it, seeing it and being seen before it, studying and understanding it, talking about it, isolating its context and the merits for its existence. You aren’t expected to consume it in the same way you would consume a soda, but that doesn’t mean that you’re expected not to consume it. That’s not a 21st century problem or even a recent one. It goes back a long, long time. Ask the pharaohs what people were supposed to do with their art.

Is it really true, that “we” want all things to work for us? Or is it “we” want “Art” to: displease, disappoint, and frustrate, the un-trained and “un-cultured” expectations of “Art”?

Yet, could it be that the critical negativity / institutional critique initiated by the historical avant-garde and neo avant-garde(s) has been metabolized by Capitalism. Capital in the 21st century, parodies power, trivializes value and obfuscates reality. Unfortunately, “Art” continues to parody itself, blindly, following a paradigm made obsolete by a system whose politics, news outlets and economy (purposely) fail “us” every day.
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Is it really true, that “we” want all things to work for us? Or is it “we” want “Art” to: displease, disappoint, and frustrate, the un-trained and “un-cultured” expectations “Art”?

Yet, could it be that the critical negativity / institutional critique initiated by the historical avant-garde and neo avant-garde(s) has been metabolized by Capitalism. Capital in the 21st century, parodies power, trivializes value and obfuscates reality. Unfortunately, “Art” continues to parody itself, blindly, following a paradigm made obsolete by a system whose politics, news outlets and economy (purposely) fail “us” every day.
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Art can’t save human lives or make you a better person; it doesn’t even care if you’re there or not. That’s its power. I guess in our day and age we forget that so easily. We want all things to work for us.