Your Art World: Or, The Limits of Connectivity

Abstract

4 Gary McWilliams and Steven Gray, 'Slimming Down Stores', The Wall Street Journal, 29 April 2005; Jane J. Kim, Latte with Your Loan?', The Wall Street Journal, 17 May 2006 For starters, consider the lounge. What exhibition today is complete without one? A good example was provided by 'Be Creative! Der kreative Imperativ', a show that opened at Zurich's Design Museum in late 2002. Participating artists, designers, architects and theorists contributed projects devoted to the themes of neo-liberal economic policy, flexible business management and immaterial labour. To get a sense of the show's layout, think hip dot-com startup. Or, in the words of its curator, the Swiss artist Marion von Osten, 'a modern space for living and working, ranging from the loft to the open-plan office, alternating production and regeneration, and using game tables, advisory literature and chill out zones'.1 Now compare this to the more recent 'Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne' at the Philadelphia ICA, a show with a similar sounding title, also phrased in the imperative ? only, rather than 'be creative', its command, following the mar keting trend ignited by the popularity of websites such as MySpace and YouTube, was to customise and personalise, to be se/f-creative. (Our, my and your are con sumer empowerment words', notes Manning Field, Senior Vice President for brand management at Chase Card Services.2) Whereas the Z?rich show openly worried over the post-Fordist production protocols it critically mimed, the Philadelphia show stressed the liberating promise the creative personality holds out to society. Rather than flexibility, it talked about autonomy; rather than fret over neo-liberal appropri ations of the artist as an idealisation of entrepreneurial subjectivity, it pondered 'the possibilities of artistic agency... artists creating themselves'.3 It, too, featured a lounge. Who relaxes in these things? Who instead doesn't feel a strong ambivalence, if not irritation, when happening upon the lounge? Of course, the irritation is the best part. Contradictions bottleneck here. Typically the lounge is meant to signify a progressive artistic or curatorial approach to exhibitions, one that privileges context and process over discrete objects, that turns away from static commodity display in favour of a more dynamic environment of ongoing, interactive meaning production. The lounge demonstrates how 'meaning is fugitive ... beyond the object or image as such ... complexly wound up with social dynamics', to quote curator Bennett Simpson from the Make Your Own Life catalogue. But the lounge as organic social oasis sprouting in the middle of the staid institution answers other agendas as well. With the spread of instrumentalised and instrumentalising communications technology, social exchange is increasingly ensnared within the logic of commodity exchange. The lounge descends from that hybrid architectural offspring of the New Economy, what Starbucks founder and chairman Howard Schultz famously calls 'the third place', a casual multi-use site mixing home and office, business and leisure, private and public, production and consumption, a space equally amenable to group brainstorming, web-surfing and poetry readings. Ample couches, errant reading material, choice tunes and palpable ambiance now come standard in not only the new project-oriented office configura tions but also in what is called 'community-centric retailing' ? from the small lounge-ish satellites of big-box outlets such as Best Buy to redesigned bank branches that serve espresso drinks and offer yoga classes.4 This isn't just a matter of conjuring 'parallels' between superstructure and base. As surplus value grows frothier around such intangible and instantly obsolete commodities as events, services, affective experiences and word-of-mouth buzz,