Art in the service of globalism

Exclusive interview conducted by Patrice-Hans Perrier in 2020 with Aude de Kerros and review of her latest book

 By Patrice-Hans Perrier

We resume the thread of the discussion on the place of arts and culture in the process of domination of the globalist ORDO. Following the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris, many are wondering about the future of our cultural heritage in a context where the entertainment industries are in the process of taking over completely. There is danger in the house since the Parisian town councillors, fully supported by the Macron government, wish to take advantage of the great reconstruction site of the Gothic cathedral to establish a tourist park in the heart of the Ile de la Cité.

Fire sale

In addition, the French president has set a deadline of five years to rebuild part of the colossal work that had taken over two centuries to complete. A plethora of experts have spoken out against this marathon project and some see it as a political will to make the completion of the site coincide with the coming of the Olympic Games in the French capital. What's more, several international architectural firms have been jostling each other at the gate to present sketches of futuristic projects that are completely disrespectful of the history and historical heritage of the site. It is as if Notre-Dame de Paris and the whole of the Ile de la Cité had to be made into a new prestigious destination in the circuit of "new intelligent cities" of the future.

A tabula rasa

If the cathedral could be the heart of the medieval city, it is now only a neuralgic tourist center capable of attracting 14 million visitors per year. It is therefore necessary to "rehabilitate" this historic monument in accordance with a vision of the marketing of "smart cities" that relies on "attractiveness" in order to gain market share. Since the city is, from now on, delivered to the appetites of the international financial markets. Deprived of its legendary spire that looked like a gigantic sundial, the stone vessel will never again be a place of teaching, meditation or pilgrimage. Our political decision-makers rather wish to make of it a kind of tourist sarcophagus in the service of a new marketing of the Ile de la Cité.

Art at the service of the city

And yet, the writer Daniel-Rops had already spoken to us about the birth and destiny of the great Gothic cathedrals in edifying terms: "It has happened sometimes in history - not very often - that a human society expressed itself entirely in a few perfect and privileged monuments, that it knew how to fit into works bequeathed to future generations all that it carried within itself of creative vigor, of deep spirituality, of technical possibilities and talents. Such flowers only bloom and reach their fullness when the sap is pure and abundant, that is to say, when society is fertile and harmonious, and when there exists in its mass that instinct of creation, that spiritual fervor which, carrying mortal man above himself, pushes him to eternalize himself. Such works are not born by chance, but from obscure patiences and great hopes, in a favorable moment of time ".

The city at the service of developers

It seems that nowadays only shopping malls and other boils of star architecture are invited to this remodeling of the historical centers of a city that is becoming an amusement park for tourists and technocrats of the new "digital economy". The indigenous populations having been pushed to the peri-urban margins, the monuments and squares that formed the generic threads of this urban fabric have been razed or put under glass. And this is what may well await Notre-Dame as the bulk of the urban relics now serve only to lure the stateless consumers who have replaced the former citizens.

We said it before: "What is left of elite or popular cultures, in an era where "cultural products" are used as AVATARS to promote marketing strategies or, to put it another way, indoctrination campaigns of citizens who have become consumers. Of the notion of cultural industry, it is the first term which holds our attention in that the culture represents only a production being taken in charge by an industry in the service of the material or symbolic surplus value captured by the dominant forces of the market ". Now, in a context where, for the most part, our city centers have been emptied of their populations, while the urban fabric has been destroyed by the conquests of real estate developers, the authorities in place have taken the decision to preserve in a vacuum a few architectural masterpieces likely to constitute poles of attraction.

Contemporary art as a bargaining chip

It is with these considerations in mind that we undertook a private interview with Aude de Kerros, using as a pretext the release of her latest book on the current issues of international contemporary art (ICA). "CONTEMPORARY ART - MANIPULATION AND GEOPOLITICS" is like a guidebook that helps us to understand the stakes of an art market that is only accountable to a handful of very wealthy investors.

Author, engraver and painter, our interlocutor shares with us this apprehension concerning the hold of the financial circles on a cultural world which is put at the step in order to serve objectives of short-term profitability and ideological indoctrination. It sets the table for an in-depth study of the processes that participate in the globalization of the transactions that enamel an art market that looks like an institution "capable of beating money", in a context where art serves only as "bill of exchange". If the contemporary Art became a vector of soft power to the service of all the CIA of this world, Aude de Kerros warns us that it is Marcel Duchamp and the other epigones of the conceptual Art who allowed to dematerialize the art to make a "facial value" or nominal value of it.

It was necessary to dematerialize the art in order to be able to make of it a currency of exchange. It is made thing according to the author who estimates that the dadaists, Marcel Duchamp and the American POP ART allowed the operators of the international markets - and all the agencies of intelligence - to push the market of the art in the last retrenchments of the fetishization of the object and its assumption of responsibility by the setting in market of its "nominal value". Thus, always according to her, "the conceptualism is not any more art in the common sense of the term, that it is modern or not: in art, the form expresses the sense and the criteria of judgment are first of all aesthetic. The adoption of the conceptualism like unique avant-garde as much as definitive has a determining advantage: with this new instrument, the CIA is not limited any more by the silence of the images, but can also appropriate and divert the revolutionary speeches: social criticism, art for all, clean slate, etc., and, thus, to create a decoy that would be fatal to the intellectuals of the left ".

Destroying the notion of work

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the time when the CIA used the lyrical expression of a Jackson Pollock or the POP ART of a Robert Rauschenberg as weapons of mass destruction against the socialist realism honored in the countries of the former Soviet empire. Aude de Kerros goes through the pivotal period from the post-war period to May '68 to make us aware that the epigones of conceptual art and Dadaism have served the imperialist aims of the New York art market and the American secret service. Taking advantage of the "Trente Glorieuses" - the years of economic prosperity which cover the years 1950-60-70 - the Anglo-Saxon financiers created a new avatar in order to monopolize the contemporary art market and all its declensions. Thus, the American art dealer Leo Castelli would have manipulated - still if we rely on the analysis of Mrs. de Kerros - the Parisian art critic Pierre Restany to invest, like a Trojan horse, the City of Light. Disciple of Marcel Duchamp's thought, the theoretician Restany had not hesitated to proclaim in his 1960 manifesto that "Painting is dead!", a slogan that suited perfectly the Wall Street financiers eager to get their hands on the emerging market of contemporary Art.

Aude de Kerros underlines that "the promotion by the CIA of abstract expressionism in Europe did not provoke the expected shock". In fact, after the fall of the fascist and Nazi regimes, and in the wake of the slow decomposition of the Soviet bloc, the neorealist aesthetic was no longer popular in a Europe where all aesthetic currents began to circulate more freely than ever. And, from there, the new POP painting and the lyrical expression were not really enough to throw down the artists of the Old Continent. If Jackson Pollock's scabs had indeed aroused some curiosity towards the end of the 1950s, the POP ART armada would not manage to do much damage in the Parisian art world and elsewhere in Europe.

However, it is the thought of Marcel Duchamp which will manage to infiltrate by all the pores of a system of the art henceforth prisoner of the Anglo-Saxon markets. Thus, "from 1960, the strategies of Castelli [obviously adored by the markets of Wall Street and the American secret services] and the work of the CIA begin to produce results. The choice of a new avant-garde with Marcel Duchamp's conceptualism as its founding theory is effective. Its doxa affirms: "Is art everything that the artist says is art". To create - continues Aude de Kerros - it is to conceive and declare. The work is the concept! The form, the material object, is only the negligible part of the work, a craft that we can subcontract. Duchamp defined this conceptual practice as a "non-art", his artists as "anarchists". This time, the rupture is total: if the conceptual art is declared to be of "art" instead of "art" it is that the word "art" changed of definition. The criteria, until then aesthetic, of concordance between content and form, were understandable, shareable, debatable. They allowed an evaluation to which one could adhere or not, by knowing why. It is not the case any more with the conceptual art ".

It is a curious paradox that a Parisian pseudo-artist, Marcel Duchamp, provided the ideal conceptual framework for the New York markets! From now on, in the wake of the liberal-libertarian revolution, a new definition of art is born on the premises of the extravagances thrown to the face of the world by the dadaists, the conceptuals and their epigones of the "death of art".

A dematerialization of art

Aude de Kerros confided in us in the context of an interview that dealt precisely with this dematerialization of art for the benefit of new investors in the world of the so-called "contemporary" culture. Questioned about this manipulation of the products of the contemporary art, she gets carried away: "Today, for example, I learned that a Japanese artist having produced a kind of small graffiti - quite simplistic - succeeded in making millions on the market. So one asks the killer question: "what is the relationship between the thing and the price?" The answer is complicated. Let's just say that at the beginning, there are maybe 200 people playing together in a closed circle of privileged investors. So they form a network and they decide the "face" value of the works they circulate through their respective circles. After that, you have the media circle, because it is necessary to make things visible, and at the very end of the chain, you find the state institutions that buy. Taking advantage of his insider position, the privileged collector, even before the work has been put on the market, has already bought the product. There are all the concentric circles of the circles of diffusion and sale of the art - galleries, biennials, free ports, etc. - and, you find all the circles of the art market. - and, finally, you find the public institutions. They are players who play a financial game whose engine is constituted by this network of privileged collectors who are able to invest between 1 million and 100 million for a work, just like that, without any problem!"

An endogamic system

It is understandable that, in such a context, a handful of members of the hyperclass are able to influence the "high art market" and to phagocytize state institutions so that the works of their foals are exhibited there and, therefore, gain value on the market of cultural speculation. It is undoubtedly what explains the reason why the complicit public institutions do not want to get rid of all this system of quotation, development and promotion of a contemporary art which relies on ontological values resolutely conceptual. The artistic products, thus wanted, will not be judged any more on this anthropological base which, always according to Mrs. de Kerros, "makes that everyone looks for the beauty and the harmony according to its experience with the work of art".

Thus, what could be more convenient than to use a conceptual system functioning on the mode of the communicating vessels: of the conception of the work until its evaluation, all the discourse which serves to position the art is built from valences which have nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the "product". The work of art will, consequently, be judged on the basis of a system of abstract, conceptual values, which can be manipulated at will by the media, the art market or the speculators. The work of art within this artificial system has no value in itself. It is the discourse on the art that determines the value and allows to fix quotations thereafter and, a fortiori, to justify the monopolization of the public institutions to diffuse the "products" of this artificial market that functions on the mode of the feedback loop.

And, speaking of this mode of operation, our interlocutor specifies that "these people are active within an endogamic system and, if it stops, everything collapses. It is precisely because it is a closed system that value can be produced. But, against all odds, they will have to suffer the disadvantages of the advantages. The circuit of the intellectual milieu producing a critique on art is linked to the state. It is therefore a system that protects itself with guards, with barriers, and the beneficiaries of this closed system are desperate because now, thanks to the circulation of information on the net, their nonsense can be told”.

The art lost its soul

We had already specified, in an article entitled The POP culture: pornographic art par excellence, that " of the ready-made of Marcel Duchamp until the herds of naked onlookers to be photographed by Spencer Tunick, while passing by the arte povera of the years 1970-80, the world of the western art is satisfied to put in scene of the rogatons that testify of the incontestable and undisputed hold of the marketing. The contemporary art takes place of process of recovery of the products of the culture of the marketing, since the culture is not any more a space of representation to the service of the spiritual quest of a given community ".

Precisely, about this spirituality which was driven out of the world of the art, Aude de Kerros estimates that "the collapse of the notion of the transcendent and the spirituality makes that there is a considerable vacuum and it is the money which ended up filling this vacuum. Money has no soul: it is a good servant and a bad master. It is the collapse of civilization, which is linked to the collapse of spirituality - and of the notion of transcendence - that makes the West so badly off, because it is a Western story, this business of contemporary art”.

The reality of globalism

Taking note of a globalism which is not only an ideology, but being able to correspond to certain aspects of the reality, Mrs. de Kerros helps us to conclude our article by means of a revealing passage contained in her last essay. Indeed, making against bad luck good heart, she warns us that "this Western constraint of an ideology of art, certainly very adapted to the business, can it still be exerted for a long time on a market today globalized? If money interests are easily shared on a planetary scale, culture is not so easily imposed ... Artists and amateurs from other continents are perhaps not ready to give up their aspirations entirely [...] ".

If it is true that several "emerging" societies have still not been entirely contaminated by this system and this mercantile vision of art, the fact remains that the ubiquity of the Internet serves above all to promote ideologies that rest, first and foremost, on the "society of the spectacle". Moreover, the last survivors of the dying middle class do not always have the means to afford "affordable" works of art, in a context where the tax system favors large investors. We know the song about tax havens and other ways of getting around them, which are the prerogative of the hyperclass.

Aude de Kerros confided to us, at the end of the interview, that she hoped that the sites that promote "dissident artists" could help to set up parallel markets, so that authentic creation would be able to make itself known. Still, it would be necessary that the Internet users are interested in something else than the promotion of their ego or in this flight in front which characterizes the postmodern communications.

Optimistic, certainly, Aude de Kerros remains realistic by affirming that "the financial crash of 2008 marked a turning point in the field of the appreciation of the contemporary Art. The world public witnessed the great spectacle of the dematerialization of securities. Obviously, the so-called "secured" financial derivatives had no material counterpart, were not based on tangible wealth. Despite the fact that the financial market did not drag the art market down, the analogy was made with what had become very similar to a financial product: contemporary art”.

A demonic hubris

If this system of the contemporary Art allowed to dematerialize the fundamentals of the artistic expression, it is perhaps because our elites were submerged by a hubris taking all on its passage. Aude de Kerros helps us to understand the strings of a system of cultural reproduction that serves to "monetize" conceptual works and, at the same time, to promote messages that play into the hands of a globalist soft power. However, it does not epilogue too much on this degeneration which is the characteristic of the civilizations which die. Apart from a few pearls, like this one: "Contemporary art, whose proclaimed goal is transgression, subversion, clean slate, has had since the beginning of its existence the imperative need to be quickly museumized to exist. One can say that the museum of contemporary Art is consubstantial to this redefinition of the art henceforth secular ".

In fine, if we follow the thread of the discussion, force us to notice that the public institutions, lending hand to this artificial market, contributed to sanctuarize an air of time which flirts dangerously with the most complete nihilism. Let's add a little more, even if the cup is full. Was the terrible fire that devastated the entire frame of Notre-Dame de Paris the result of an unfortunate chance or the work of an evil genius of in situ performance? In any case, the reconstruction of this heritage treasure could be used to convert the august cathedral into a museum of contemporary art. One could reproduce there, by holograms, episodes of this Dantesque fire and, along the way, celebrate the victory of a culture that has definitively buried spirituality.

An essential book to read:

"CONTEMPORARY ART - MANIPULATION AND GEOPOLITICS"

By Aude de Kerros, Editions Eyrolles, Paris, 2019, ISBN: 978-2-212-57302-2

Author's website:

https://www.audedekerros.fr/