1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?
The rhetorics of “democratism” and “internationalism” are characteristic of the world-wide process of globalization. Whose “internationalism”? Whose “solidarity”? It is crucial to understand all of this, because there are no abstract “communications”, “unifications”, or “brotherhoods”. The pathos of “solidarity” or of “equal opportunity” etc. are incidental to big corporations and business projects. And the way the question is formulated in its given form hardly allows for the development of any adequate solution. I don’t agree with the way it is posed. It is impossible to conquer global representation, because there will always be millions of people who lick their fingers at a spectacle in its alienated form. A simple call for “democratization” will not change anything in that matter.
The democratization of the art world is a tendency that doesn’t exist. I simply don’t agree to the fact that it plays any role at all. For this reason, I have no means of making any judgment, insofar as the “chances for the ongoing democratization of art” are concerned.
4. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture? In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?
The last years have failed to produce any fundamentally new form of community. Moreover, all of the old forms have succumbed to commercialization, degenerating or dying out. All of this has happened without the exclusion of “crowds” or groups of friends, dependent on the global media-order, infected by the virus of “success”, “the very best” and all the rest. In principle, only one thing is important: movements and artists represent a certain value. Their activity offers a fundamental appeal. Subcultures are often much alike in their use of pseudo-activist slang. A sign-system with referents such as “realness” or “radicalism” is actually little more than a clich? since its over-exploited terms can be related to anything at all. If a movement arose who potential values would not consist in making the “top ten”, of becoming a trend-setter, there might actually be something to talk about. However, most movements, directions and groups measure themselves by (and represent) the values of clich?s. “Radical chic” is a gene of “victoriomorphosis” (=triumphant opportunism), destructive from within. All of these international communities aren’t even worth a damn, simply because their architecture (their structural base) is identical to a key product of the media clans, “families” and mafias. Art only deceives itself through a false orientation toward what seem to be objective societal precedents. But these do not exist.
5. Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematique? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?
In the final analysis, global significance is constructed by concrete personalities, which interpret and re-transmit their personal taste in the regime and the rhetoric of “socially relevant events. The verdict on the acceptance of projects or programmatic texts is always pronounced on a personal basis, deciding on what to promote, what to launch, and what to leave rotting in marginality. Global significance is a projection, a phantasm of an individual who suffers under the mania of “globalism”. Context is never objective. Mass culture produces the fiction of “collectiveness”. The unification of language and style is impossible. If someone “understands” you, it is a lie, a game, a construction of meaning. It’s always nice to “agree”, just as it is also always nice to fuck. Because fucking means that you are loved. But that is a fiction.
See the Russian version of the site for the author’s complete answer.
