"Other than capitalism, what qualifies conceptual art?”

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"A fantastical text concerning transformation, Jacob Wren’s novel Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim follows a narrator to an unidentified liberated zone, where noncapitalist, collective practices are formed, reworked, and communalized. The zone is unidyllic as it continues to be bombed and fired upon by nearby and faraway imperialists. Amidst the daily raids, the narrator is allowed to sit in on town meetings, where economics and trade become reinvented. In one such meeting, the narrator hears a woman discussing how concerns over goods being “too expensive” must also be applied to items being “too cheap.” She says, “Just as you mustn’t accept a price that is too high, you also must not fight, nor constantly search, for a price that is too low … You need to understand that those who sell you these things also need to live.”

This gallows humor highlights the disparities between life and death and locates a price so low that some are explicitly not allowed to live. Tellingly, Cattelan, the supposed prankster who will sell and hire others to do everything and treats all matter as dispensable, predictably imposes a boundary on engagement with his own critique. In response to Mr. Alam’s critiques of his exploitation, Cattelan stated that “art, by its nature, does not solve problems—if it did, it would be politics.” Evading criticism through a well-worn notion of aesthetic isolationism, Cattelan offers art that ideologically affirms the status quo, upholding supply-chain repression and enforcing and extending class domination. (He offers, in other words, enmeshed and predictable capitalism-as-art.)

Regarding that which is purposefully degraded and denied in the supply chain: when Daniel Druet, the artist who made Untitled (Stephanie), sued Cattelan’s gallery over authorship and payment, contemporary artists such as Sophie Calle signed an open letter in support of Cattelan. It stated: “Daniel Druet’s quest for recognition as the exclusive author of the works imagined by Maurizio Cattelan opens the door to the disqualification of conceptual art.” Does the qualification of conceptual art hinge on the erasure of laborers and the repression of its making? The artists who signed the letter seem to think so. Other than capitalism, what qualifies conceptual art?”

- Eunsong Kim, No Aesthetic Autonomy Without Labor Autonomy



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