Sometimes, ‘it’s not race, it’s class’ is the correct response to inequality.
Attempts at overturning or reforming globalisation will fall short of expectations unless they strike at the heart of Davos.
Is the fiction of art’s economic value now the key measure of culture? Does it matter that we don’t understand the figures? What would Baudrillard say about NFTs? Can we hope to restore aesthetic ideas of value?
Is the fiction of arts’s economic value now the key measure of culture? Are we now willingly econo-cultural agents? Does it matter that we don’t understand the figures?
The deceptive magic of NFTs is that the items they represent – memes, animations, screenshots – can be claimed to be collectable and therefore valuable. But art’s tendency to trade claims of value outside of its own field without check is profoundly worrying.
Who decides how much culture is enough? Even before the pandemic, the laws of supply and demand could not explain the art industry’s bubble-like growth, nor could the market forces or policy be blamed for the precarisation of artistic labour.