May 7, 6.30 pm
Zeigam Azizov
Oil and Art in the Global Age
-
Culture has stopped being negational and has become an instrument for expansion instead. Now that artistic gesture is often understood as a «means without an end,» it has become the playground for politics. In most developing countries today, excessive wealth derived from oil and gas is used to «promote» the arts or so-called «radical forms of art», which are usually late to come onto the scene. Stuart Hall has dubbed this trend «regressive modernization». In other words, there is a certain form of art today that repeats the recent radical gestures of artists, but evades the political context, which comfortably suits it for the dominant politics of art exhibitions, especially the biennial culture. Many biennales (Moscow, Sharjah, Baku, etc.) are sponsored by oil and gas money. In the global age, the reproducibility of conditions of multinational production is at the same time the reproduction of the form of art that is ready to sustain these conditions. (Z. A.) … >>