Between the Product and the Work of Art: Aesthetic Fetishism and the Financialization of Art

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ideological transformation of modernistic aesthetic fetishism into what Professor Rastko Močnik has termed “aesthetic imperialism” in contemporary art. Our hypothesis is that this transformation is an effect of the overdetermination of artistic production to fictitious capital. In order to examine this hypothesis, we shall explore the transformation of the simple, modernist work of art into the twofold, contemporary work of art (which must first be a claim to aesthetic evaluation and only then a work of art). We do not suggest that modernism did not know the term “artwork,” as applying to those art products that were not recognized as works of art, but rather that there was a change in the very process of aesthetic evaluation. We believe that, unlike the unitary modernist recognition of products as works by the institution of art, there is twofold recognition in the contemporary age. Here the claim to aesthetic evaluation is allowed to every product, but confirmed only to those that successfully reproduce the ruling “aesthetic imperialism.” Even though ideologists of contemporary art present this change as a result of progressivism that is inherent to the institution of art, we would like to argue that it is an effect of the abovementioned overdetermination of artistic production by fictitious capital, that is, its effects in aesthetic and legal fetishism. This hypothesis will be examined in two relatively autonomous instances: economic and ideological (artistic).