On Formalist Art

A Conversation with Miguel Aro:

with

Elihu Tellius

Interviewer: The artistic community knows you as a writer. What most people don’t know is that your work also includes music, video, painting, sculpture, installation and performance. I find your work interesting for several reasons. One is your tendency to use traditional forms such as painting and poetry to address complex and interrelated issues of art, technology, economics, politics and religion. Most artists use the instruments of technology -- video, robotics and so forth, to discuss technology. They don’t normally express mathematical formula as poetry. Another is your tendency to take an idea, express it in one medium, painting for example, and then use the results of that effort as input to a distinctly different process in another medium such as video. You refer to this as transmedia. This constant cross-referencing of ideas and works leads to the justifiable criticism that you are deliberately engaging in obscure and self-indulgent artistic practices, that you are pretending to be progressive and experimental when you are really just another traditional art for art’s sake artist. A late modernist so to speak.

Aro: It would be easier for me if we started with a question.

I: Ok. I’ve got two. One, how would you go about describing yourself as an artist? Two, do you have a formal agenda where your art is concerned?

A: Here is the problem: Identity begins when you embrace the immediacy of your life. The simple fact of your being is identity and reality enough. At the same time, the objective content of a single instance of anything, no matter what it is, overwhelms every human capacity, language being the first to go, until being becomes no more than nothing and no less than everything. Heads or tails. Or even heads and tails. Now that I think about it, perhaps it is not a problem.

I: So what are you saying?

A: That in a very important way, my essential identity is ineffable and identical with your own. That god is a unity and as such neither needs nor has a name.

I: Let me ask a different question. In your last book you seemed to focus on identity more than anything else. Don’t you think that most questions related to identity have already been answered. As least where poststructuralism and postmodernism are concerned, aren’t we at the blah, blah, blah . . . blah, blah, blah stage of that inquiry?

A: Identity is the first question mind has to answer. It is the root of the categorical tree. Identity is the first ontological principle. Where language and reason are concerned, everything has an identity because everything has a name. Even the nothingness of nothingness has a name. Issues related to identity now seem fixed and well-defined only because more and more people have been conditioned to treat identity as a multiple choice question as opposed to a fill in the blank question. Do we believe that the universe is unique and a unity? Can we believe that and at the same time believe that it is also random and composed of discrete non-related entities? In the first case, you end up seeing yourself and everything around you in relationship to some higher form of order. In the second case, you pursue language, specifically natural language, logic and mathematics, as the principal means by which to calculate or intuit the odds of anything existing or not existing. It does not matter how simple or complex the calculation. In either case, we proceed from our beliefs to our thoughts and only at that point will we say that we know anything. As an example of the second case, let us start with what you just said. In all likelihood, it will make it into print (and by print I mean some textual representation) and then someone will be able to cut it out of whatever it was they read it in, for whatever reason, and paste it into something else and no one will know where it came from or where it is going to end up. They will have to guess. And the fact of their guessing they will call knowledge.

I: Are you suggesting, following Duchamp, that an assimilative, combinatory approach to making art will eventually become the dominant mode of cultural production? And isn’t that just another way of saying that new art is no longer possible, at least not in the same sense that new art was possible during the Italian Renaissance say, or early twentieth century Modernism?

A: I do not think about it in that way. There is a qualitative difference between art then and art now. Art used to be like chess. Now it is more like poker. The assumption is that it used to be much more deterministic in its methods and outcomes. Whoever won was the better player. Now, the situation has changed. Once the initial cards are dealt, players place their bets, try to determine which cards the other players have and place their bets again. From that point on it is luck-on-luck. Table stakes. You can think of yourself as a genius, the best artist in town or in the world, and maybe you are. If you are determined to achieve some sort of brand status, good luck. But remember, there is no guarantee. You can be a great artist by traditional or contemporary standards and there is no guarantee that anyone will ever know you existed, because it is now market opinion as much as the fact of the artifact that establishes value in art. Great art is made every day all over the world, but it is the artists and the art in New York and London that matter most where the exchange value of a visual art object, such as a painting, is concerned. If you want to be a great artist you need to first of all go to the right art school and then go live in either New York or London. If you want to accomplish the same thing as a writer, you must somehow find your way to the top of one of the American publishing conglomerates.

I: If that’s the way it is, why bother making art at all? Just live your life as a hospitality worker or whatever and call it art. Why bother making traditional art artifacts if they’re destined to become nothing more than corporate assets?

A: To make an artifact as if you were a machine and the artifact a product of a manufacturing process does not remove the record of your humanity. Not from the artifact or from the process. You cannot help but be human. You live in the field of time. You are subject to the same basic experiences, emotions, actions, thoughts and questions as every other human who has ever lived. You were born and you will die. You cannot help yourself. You cannot help but create art as a human being.

I: Tell me again what being famous has to do with poker.

A: Forget about poker. Forget about being famous. Trying to become famous as an artist for historical purposes is not a reasonable goal. Not with globalization and a world population of nine billion by the year 2050. We are going to see international culture wars as well as the beginnings of new multinational cultures. As the European Union ascends, European artists will increase in importance. The same is true of China and India. The YBA (ed. Young British Artists) art market is a good example of the primacy of marketing and branding over product. World culture is going to be multipolar. Investors in Rauschenberg and Pollock will be fortunate if their investments maintain parity with as yet undiscovered Chinese, European and Indian artists over the next hundred years. There is a great deal of “pump and dump” activity occurring in today’s art market. Eventually, every major artist will come to occupy a position in a global commodity index not unlike any other commodity index.

I: So what advice would you give artists where their careers and reputations are concerned?

A: If you want to make serious art, make it for people who are on the lookout for it and who will make an effort to understand and appreciate it. Don’t cave in to fashion. Otherwise, just do your art and whatever else pleases you and try not to hurt yourself or anyone else in the process.

I: That sounds like a cliché.

A: Universal truths usually do.

I: It’s a lot to expect from a person. That they should achieve enlightenment as the result of a cliché.

A: Sometimes a cliché is to truth what vanilla is to ice cream. It is a cliché for a reason. Enlightenment is a word. Cliché is a word. In the overall scheme of things, the fact that they occasionally show up together in the same sentence does not mean that either one has authority over the other at other times and in other places.

I: No offense was intended.

A: Perhaps and perhaps not. But both cases present us with a similar opportunity. Tension defined as force against force is a fundamental principle in the universe. Perhaps that is what is happening here. A resistance to change in the prevailing assumptions concerning the nature and value of art. Then again, perhaps thinking and talking so much about what we mean means that we are not quite sure what we mean. Not that confusion is always a bad thing. In small doses, confusion can sometimes be a very good thing.

I: I like it that we can change the subject at any point and you don’t seem to mind that there’s no continuity whatsoever.

A: There is always continuity. The universe is a unity and everything in it is randomly accessible and everything in it maintains an infinite number of relationships with everything else. A moment ago, I started thinking about Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Mickey Mouse, Madonna, Hitler, JFK and also Coke, FedEx, Nike, McDonald’s and Mercedes-Benz as a group and whether or not there is any real difference between personal artistic identity and brand identity where they are concerned.

I: But Nike is not a person. Besides, doesn’t personal identity aspire to brand identity? Isn’t that what fashion, fame and even history rely on? The possibility of brand recognition, if only for a short time?

A: To aspire to be a brand name in a consumer society is to rely almost completely on the vagaries of the marketplace for one’s identity. Hopefully, one wouldn’t equate one’s sense of self with brand identity. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, had fairly strong opinions on the subject. “Soon, very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton, and either a name or not even a name; but name is sound and echo . . . and like little dogs biting one another, and little children quarrelling, laughing, and then straightway weeping.”

I: You’ve called yourself a formalist as opposed to a modernist or postmodernist or poststructuralist or some other moniker. Why?

A: In the brand of art I use, formalism denotes a primary focus on sensory and cognitive functions. In one dimension, formalism is purely conceptual. In another dimension, it is decorative and sensory. Every major writer and visual artist I can think of has made art that has both a signature conceptual content and an aesthetic that conforms in one way or another to a shared understanding of what is true and what is not, what is beautiful and what is not, what is to be desired and what is not. In other words, great art is conceptual, true, beautiful and desirable, even if on its surface it appears false, banal and ugly. The problem is that there are multiple dimensions in which formalism exists and although many of them intersect, some of them do not. Formalism is not conservative or progressive by nature. But it is programmatic and it is multidimensional. The temptation is to over-generalize. Once you do, formalism becomes a synonym for thought as opposed to feeling.

I: That would make anyone who thinks a formalist.

A: Yes, in a way. Because all great art at its root is conceptual.

I: Ah, “great art.” That’s a very formalist slash conceptual thing to say. So who isn’t a formalist?

A: Anyone who chooses a different mode of being as their primary mode of being.

I: And what mode of being would that be?

A: Whatever it may be, I do not believe that thinking is the best way to identify it.

I: Not to beat a dead horse, but there seem to be several contradictions in what you are saying. Especially in your reference to “great art.” The general assumption is that great art is the result of artistic genius. A very traditional and many would say outmoded way of thinking. In other conversations you have said that great art is art that most closely conforms to market demand over time. That seems to me to be a definition of mediocrity if I ever heard one. I fail to see what the two things have in common.

A: The making of great art is no mystery. The genius in making great art is in making art that best meets the market demand both at a given point in time and for the long term. By market demand I mean demand as established by the buyers in a market. At one end of the spectrum you have buyers who are looking for work that conforms to a specific aesthetic as defined by a small number of experts, intellectuals and investors. At the other end you have buyers whose decisions are the result of mass media marketing. And then you have everything in between. A few successful contemporary artists try to cross-market to all segments. Paintings for the patrons. Books, magazines, posters and movies for the masses. Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, David Hockney and Christo come to mind. Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy restaurant is a very interesting example, since, after the restaurant went broke, he was able to sell off his barstools at Sotheby’s for a profit as opposed to losing money in a more traditional bankruptcy auction.

I: So you’re cross-marketing a one size fits all approach to artistic production?

A: Invention is a form of hope. To be actively engaged in the creation of one’s own life is the definition of individual freedom. I believe in invention much more than I believe in marketing. For the most part, invention is based in fact. Marketing is based on opinion. Facts persist over time. Opinions are seasonal. What we are discussing is simply an economic model that describes art in the same way that it describes every other value chain: in terms of products, suppliers, consumers and transactions. It is not intended to be a history of art. The history of art is a narrative of its own invention. What we are discussing is rather a sociology of art, an economics of art.

I: You’ve said that the social systems of artistic production are also highly organized and formalist in nature. You refer to them as the “art value chain.” You say that it’s the art value chain that ultimately determines the exchange value for a given work of art.

A: Yes. In the art value chain, we have art producers and art consumers at the ends and critics, collectors, universities, foundations, museums, galleries, insurance companies, lawyers, transportation providers and a multitude of other service providers in the middle. This is the real formalism in art. It helps to think of formalism as being a substrate for artistic production. Formalism results in a product that is stable, long-lived and generally increases in value over time. Because formalism is standards based, it adapts well to incremental change. Formalism provides the architecture though which power can be transferred from generation to generation. Artifacts based on formalism are literally the jewels in the crown of civilization, signs of wealth and privilege at all times and in all cultures. That is why, even if a work of art does not begin as an artifact, it must eventually be expressed as one before its exchange value can be recognized. Ostensibly, that is what all of the players in the art value chain do. They work together to refine both the artistic experience and its artifacts. They market the sublime as a product.

I: What about an artist like Jeff Koons? He markets the banal.

A: He expresses his ideas in porcelain and high tech alloys and polymers. He markets the banal as the sublime.

I: So tell me again why you’re a formalist?

A: Formalism is useful in establishing boundary conditions and interface definitions. For example, what constitutes a painting? Does it require pigment? Does it require a plane surface? Does the frame begin or end at the edge of the image? What happens to the idea of a painting once the image is transferred to print or digital media? What does it mean to be a painter? Apart from making the image, how else does the artist mediate the image? What constitutes perfection in painting? Formalism allows you to address the question of painting in an almost limitless number of ways, all of which may be communicated using the language of formalism. Twentieth century modernism and postmodernism extended formalism to include speech, writing, performance, installation, video, sound and almost every other mode of expression in the creation of museum quality art artifacts. As a result we are now at a point where you can place formalist art in a public space and people will know that it is art. And you can place anything at all in an art space and people will know that it is art. That is because the museum or gallery is by its nature formalist.

I: Conversely, if you place non-formalist art in a public space or remove the non-formalist art from the art space no one will know it’s art.

A: That was Duchamp’s understanding and his major contribution to art.

I: He was also a great chess player.

A: Yes he was.

I: So the fact that it’s recognized as art at all means it’s formalist?

A: To some degree, yes.

I: And to be formalist it has to take the form of an artifact.

A: At some point and in one way or another, yes.

I: But you must admit that by now, formalism has exhausted the majority of its possibilities.

A: Formalism can never exhaust its possibilities, any more than science or language can.

I: What about Minimalism? Surely you must admit that after Judd, Andre, Reinhardt and Stella, there is very little left to do.

A: Minimalism is the reductionist branch of formalism. Minimalism was looking for the subatomic particles of art -- its basic components. Science is ahead of art in this respect. Science now postulates that a subatomic particle is better viewed, not as a discrete and independent physical entity, but as one of many potential frequencies or vibrations of a string that is much like the string of a musical instrument. The particles are not different physical objects. They are different vibrations of the same object. Where art is concerned, the vibrating string is probably not Minimalism. It is equally important to recognize that formalism is not synonymous with Minimalism. As an artistic practice, Minimalism is a subset of formalism. Other traditional formalist practices include art based on various combinations of perspective and narrative. This not only means realism in its various forms, but, in contemporary painting for example, tendencies as diverse as Cubism, Futurism, de Stijl, Op Art, a lot of Pop Art and even Dada with Duchamp’s "The bride stripped bare by her bachelors even" and “Etant donnés” as examples. They all continue in a tradition first described by Alberti in his work “On Painting.”

I: I thought Alberti positioned painting at the intersection of virtu and fortuna. Virtue and Fortune.

A: He did that, too.

I: The Futurists were all Fascists

A: For the most part.

I: So what does that tell you?

A: That formalism has always had a place at the table of power and privilege. This occurs for several reasons. One is its iconic nature. Another is its hierarchical structure. But another very important reason is because of its relationship to technology. Technology, language and art are the root artifacts of civilization. Formalism exists at the juncture of all three. Formalism is the means whereby they transpose each into the other. It should not be a surprise to anyone that architecture, drawing and mathematics were all part of the basic skill set of the Renaissance artist. Art and technology have always been closely related. It is as much the case today in contemporary art as it was during the Renaissance. Technology creates wealth and is the source of military and economic advantage. A society ascends or descends as a direct result of its technology. The same creativity that creates technology creates a great deal of formalist art.

I: And by formalist art you mean traditional art forms.

A: Not only traditional art forms. Nothing could be more formalist than the Internet. The Internet is a pure play technology infrastructure. Look at what is happening on the Internet where art is concerned. Not only digital images and music, but multi-player games, virtual reality, online communities and even the infrastructure are all becoming art forms in and of themselves. Technology, and therefore formalism, is quite capable of creating new product categories where art is concerned. I worked for a number of years with Internet startup companies and called it art. I believed that the invention and deployment of Internet infrastructure was an almost perfect example of contemporary, language based, formalist artistic practice, capable of doing something that Minimalism could never do. Over the past few years, it has become the principal means whereby artists enable the creation of new product categories in art.

I: By product categories you mean new art forms.

A: For the most part. But you also have to consider the fact that it is technology that establishes the boundary conditions for the physical creation of art. Sometimes technology allows you to do things you could not do before. Oil painting replaced egg tempera because you could do things with oil that you could not do with egg whites. And acrylic has become an alternative to oil painting for similar reasons. But technology can also greatly decrease the cost of artistic production at the same time that it increases its capabilities. Look at the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas. All the Renaissance style statuary at the tops of the buildings is made from Styrofoam although you would not know it unless someone told you. The Bellagio’s incredible fountain is basically a robot. But at the places where you come close to the art, its forms are more traditional. The marble columns in the lobby are real marble. And the Chihuly glass ceiling is real Chihuly. And the art gallery in the Bellagio shopping mall is filled with very expensive paintings. It is all part of the experience. When you put the whole package together, the Bellagio is a perfect example of Renaissance power, wealth and spectacle adapted to contemporary society. It is a supreme contemporary example of trompe l'oeil.

I: Which brings us to another point. You have said on several occasions that contemporary art is more informed by service economics than product economics and that whoever controls the interface controls the art. What do you mean by art as a service economy? And what do you mean by an interface?

A: When we talk about cultural production, it is usually with a focus on the art as a product or artifact. That is after all what artists make and what art collectors buy. But as is the case with any product, you should also keep in mind that the financial transaction that accompanies the purchase of the artifact is only one transaction among many. The majority of these other associated transactions are service based. You have a requirement for raw materials. Easy enough. Then you have the education of the artist and everything that goes with it. You have inventory requirements. Early on you put the art under your bed, but eventually you need a loft, a studio or even an abandoned parking garage. You also have the entire art exhibition industry which includes universities, galleries, museums, corporate buildings, airports, parks and so forth. You have all the people who maintain and support these things. You have magazines, Internet sites and a host of other marketing and sales channels. You have insurance and transportation companies. We do not usually think about these things as being part of the art, but they represent a large portion of the art value chain. Last year, for example, art was insured in the amount of thirteen billion dollars worldwide. At this point in time, much museum art remains uninsured. Insurance revenue can only go up as more and more museums are built to hold more and more art. Think about it. Given the long lifecycle of the art artifact, hundreds or even thousands of years in some cases, the associated insurance represents a huge revenue stream. At some point, revenue resulting from art insurance may exceed revenue resulting from fine art purchases. All of this is happening because in any value chain, the emphasis gradually moves from manufacturing to information and service as the industry matures. And this is because the introduction of a new service, necessary or not, is the easiest way to intermediate or re-mediate a transaction. Information and service economies are much different from manufacturing economies. They intermediate the original transaction between buyer and seller with numerous information and service transactions. In an information economy, the greatest profit is always made by the person or company who controls the transaction. Both information and service economies revolve around mediation . . . intermediation, dis-intermediation and re-intermediation. It is all about the middleman. In the case of art, the art artifact as a product is subject to the same rules as any other commercial product. Over time, as more and more intermediaries enter the value chain, the real value becomes associated with the transactions surrounding the product as opposed to the physical product itself. In an information society, the real money is in the commoditization and virtualization of the physical product. Once you begin to include digital and Internet media as art artifacts, the number of transactions and their associated revenue increase exponentially. There are many different measures of value in art. In a capitalist society, the biggest one is the money.

I: But it’s not all about capitalism. Choice begins with the individual, not with the corporation.

A: I disagree. That may be the case in an open, fully democratic society, but we are not at present an open, fully democratic society. We continue to exercise some democratic principals, but we are no longer a representative democracy or even a democratic republic. We are primarily a corporate capitalist society. China is a communist capitalist society. France is a socialist capitalist society. Capitalism does not require democracy. It only requires products, buyers and sellers. Although I am very much in favor of commerce in the form of free and fair trade, I do not see much of that right now.

I: What do you see?

A: The social order is the result of two basic phenomena. One is congregation, the tendency of two or more organisms to interact for the achievement of some implicit or explicit purpose. I know the term has a religious connotation, but it applies equally to elements of sociobiology and human sociology. The second is segregation, the tendency of those same organisms to establish some sort of hierarchy. If you are more comfortable with it, we can use the terms community and hierarchy. These two phenomena are evident in every form of social order, without exception. That is what communists, libertarians, monarchists, socialists, corporatists and fascists repeatedly fail to understand: that segregation and congregation, hierarchy and social equality, are by nature opposing, countervailing forces. They are both necessary to the social order. That is why a balance of power is an absolute requirement for any civilized society. When the social order becomes too asymmetric, moves too far in one direction or the other, conflict is inevitable. You cannot get rid of hierarchy. And you cannot get rid of the drive for social equality. What I see right now is a dangerous and unsustainable asymmetry in both American and international society, operating under the guise of democracy and free market economics. Under the right circumstances, commerce can be a great civilizing influence. Under the wrong circumstances, it skews the balance of power too far in one direction and leads to unimaginable suffering. Without a balance of power, even democracy will inevitably lead to corporatism, monopoly, militarism and war.

I: I have to say that to embrace corporate capitalism as art seems to contradict most of those values that have been historically associated with art.

A: It is important to keep in mind that after food, sex and shelter, it is culture that defines most of society’s desires. Whoever controls the culture, controls the demand for the artifacts of cultural production. That translates directly to money and power. If art is about capturing the zeitgeist, well, global capitalism is the zeitgeist. That is one of the reasons I worked with the two software companies I mentioned. For a long time, I practiced art by making traditional art objects -- poems, paintings and so forth. But at some point, because I wanted my art to be relevant to the times and as broad in its impact as I could make it, I changed the way I practiced art. In 1996 I went to work for FedEx where I worked with a number of other people to design a software architecture that became an industry-wide reference model for supply chain integration and the creation of virtual companies. A virtual company is a company that outsources everything but the transaction. Two years later, I left FedEx to co-found GlobalESP, a virtual company software provider. A year after that I co-founded Transfinity, the first company to provide dial-up web acceleration for the Internet. Although I did this for a number of reasons, one of the main reasons I worked at FedEx and GlobalESP was to reduce the economic and institutional barriers to the production and global distribution of infrastructural capital. I created Transfinity in order to make rich Web content available over the Internet as cheaply as possible and to as many people as possible. I believe that the Internet, along with wireless communications, are two of the most important tools for democratization in the world today.

I: What do you mean by democratization?

A: I mean the right of each and every human being to be free to think and speak and act in his or her own self-interest without fear of reprisal. I also mean the right of every human being to food, water, shelter, medicine, education and the information they need to make decisions.

I: That sounds great on paper, but what about reality. How do you accommodate conflicting rules of law?

A: In the west we have a tradition that extends from the Magna Carta to the UN Charter. In the US we have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? None of these conflict that I can tell.

I: What about the Bible?

A: The New Testament describes a morality consistent with these documents. In fact, it describes one of the most progressive and democratic ethics in the history of civilization.

I: What about the Old Testament?

A: The Old Testament, as it is interpreted by conservative elements, has nothing to do with Christian ethics.

I: How do you know that you’re not just assisting the rapid advancement of globalization and corporatization?

A: How do I know that I am not helping Big Brother?

I: Basically, yes.

A: Because we already are a global corporate society. We already live in a world where we are continually told that hate is love, that war is peace, and that ignorance is freedom. If we are to preserve any hope for the future we have to consciously, both as individuals and as groups, change the existing political, economic and cultural interfaces to support the full participation of humanity in this global society. We cannot unwind or undo global corporatization, but we can adapt it to support our most precious, most human qualities. We can come through this century and still be human. Adam Smith was correct. There have to be institutionalized, countervailing forces to prevent the progression from free market capitalism to monopoly to corporatism. In the absence of such forces, empire, war and suffering will always result. Always.

I: You mentioned interfaces? What do you mean by an interface?

A: An interface is the means by which information, energy or material in one domain is transformed for use in another domain. Over time interfaces become standardized. An interface can even become a type of interlingua or universal language for a given domain. The use of English in conducting international business for instance. Or the FCC’s rules governing media ownership. Whoever controls the interface controls the transformation of the information, energy or material and exercises a great deal of influence on the corresponding transactions.

I: Could you provide another example besides English?

A: There are many examples: currency, weights and measures, commodities and exchange markets, treaties and trade agreements, communications frequencies and protocols. TCP/IP [ed. pronounced tee-see-pee eye-pee] is a good example. TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol, Internet Protocol. It is the set of interfaces that describe how computer hardware communicates over the network and how computer programs talk to each other and to the hardware over the Internet. TCP/IP, like many international interfaces, is controlled primarily by American interests. If you make an Internet hardware device, a network router for example, and you are Cisco or IBM, you can maintain a dominant position over time because you are in a position to influence the TCP/IP standards. As a result you exert control over the Internet’s hardware and software infrastructure. The fact that you are influencing changes to the interfaces means you will always have an advantage over your competitors. Everyone in the market knows this, so they will not risk buying their network hardware from someone else. That is one way you can maintain a dominant position in the market over time. That is why China will never fully adopt American standards such as TCP/IP without having some ownership and control over it. If necessary, they will develop their own network interfaces, even if that means having incompatible global networks for computing and communications. More likely, they will reverse engineer (ed. copy ) it in the short run while they acquire enough wealth over time to buy ownership in those American companies who do control the interface. Companies such as IBM, Sun, Intel and Cisco.

They may also gain control by adopting next generation technologies at a faster rate than competing countries. The struggle for control of an interface can even effect international conflicts. Currently, you can only buy OPEC oil with American dollars. Since we are the only country in the world that has no reserve requirement for its oil currency, America gets to print its oil dollars for free, basically the cost of the printing and distribution process, via the Department of the Treasury and the international banking system. No other country gets to do that. If, as a country, you do not have dollars, you have to either borrow them at interest or sell things to get them. In 2000, Iraq began selling its oil in euros instead of dollars through the United Nations. That could have started a domino effect with potentially severe impacts on the dollar’s role in international trade. One of the many reasons we went to war in Iraq was to stop its trading in euros and to set an example to other oil producing countries. That is also one of the many reasons the European Union did not back us in the war. It was not in their economic interest to do so. The increasing competition between the dollar, the euro and the yuan as the world’s dominant economic transactional interface has as great a potential for global conflict as does fundamentalist extremism. This idea of control over the interface applies as much to culture as to anything else. What you have to ask yourself is, “What are the primary cultural interfaces and who controls them?”

I: If that’s the case, what is the advantage in talking about artistic production in economic terms as opposed to political terms such as neocolonialism or gender bias?

A: Because we are past the point of talking strictly in terms of neocolonialism or gender bias. We live in the shadow of a global superpower. The entire world is standing at the edge of a precipice. Anyone who does not see that is not looking. Where globalization is concerned, economics supersedes politics. Rather than use terms like neocolonialism or hegemony, we should be talking about neocorporatism, the weaving together of nation independent global corporate entities whose power is so great that they are capable of forcing nations and social institutions into their service, solely in the interest of money. That is why America has become what it has become. It is about money and power and nothing else. At this point in time, economic factors affect artistic production as much or more than do creativity or social consciousness or even politics. You can look at the art being made today and see that the majority of it is being made in direct response to these factors. I do not wish to oversimplify, but where the value of an art object is concerned, a painting or a sculpture for example, the size of the object, the materials it is made of, the difficulty of making it, the collector list and sales history of the artist, the reputation of the agent and the socio-economic demographics of the buyer community determine the exchange value of the art object much more than do other factors. And that includes its innovativeness or the art historical context in which it finds itself. That occurs at the micro level. At the macro level we need to look at national and international economic and military power. It has been the case throughout history and it remains the case today. Look at the way China, and especially Beijing, is increasing its market share in the international art markets. This is solely the result of China’s growing economic and military influence. It is not in China’s interest to import American contemporary art. It is in China’s interest to export Chinese contemporary art. I have a friend from China with whom I occasionally go shopping. She always checks the markings on the products before she buys them to make sure they were manufactured in China. Even though she lives in America, she understands the importance of balance of trade to China. China does not yet have the economy to consume its own production as do America and Europe. It will, soon enough, and it will not need us anymore.

I: So is this a bad thing for the US art market?

A: I do not think so. To have a diverse and competitive market is almost always a good thing.

I: I didn’t know China was still interested in military power.

A: China is the largest importer of arms in the world today. They buy American missile technology from Israel and submarines from Russia and they will soon be purchasing arms from the EU.

I: You seem to be mixing and matching modernist and postmodernist concepts and contexts in an almost cavalier fashion. You insist on the unity and truth of science in one breath and then rail against globalization in the next. You talk about cultural production in terms of service economics and commoditization while at the same time using terms such as creativity, invention and artistic genius. I can’t tell which side you’re on. I can’t tell if you’re anti-art or anti-anti-art.

A: I am not against globalization at all. Globalization represents the future. But I do see global corporatism as the greatest danger to humanity and individual freedom today. And I also know that individual and cultural identity are not mutually exclusive categories. Understanding identity as a social phenomenon does not preclude a belief in identity as a universal, integrative truth. It is time to move past modernism and postmodernism, to view cultural production as an integrated technological, political and economic process, a process that involves both appropriation and invention, consensus and individual creativity. I believe strongly in certain Enlightenment principles, such as the primacy of the individual and the possibility of knowledge. I also understand that cultural value is as much the result of consensus formation as any other factor. This way of looking at things is not some radical, new approach. All you have to do is look at some of the leading artists today and you can see this process at work. Look at Jeff Koons. He understands perfectly well that the value of an art object does not result solely from traditional concepts of creativity, but from its position in the value chain. This understanding is the basis of his art, his artistic genius, so to speak. He is intelligent and capable and knows exactly what he is doing. He did not start his career as a starving artist in SoHo. He was a commodities broker on Wall Street and a public relations executive at MoMA and put those skills to use in building his rolodex. It was as much his access to and understanding of the art market as anything else that made his career. He does not actually construct the work. He supplies the ideas. He knows to place his work at the intersection of art, technology and money. He always makes a point to surround his projects with the most prestigious people he can find. It is important to his image that we know he has collaborated with the physicist Richard Feynman. Damien Hirst is another recent example. Please do not think that I am criticizing either of them. Their work is interesting. They are perfecting techniques developed by artists as diverse as Jasper Johns, Warhol and Duchamp, although I must add that even now, at the beginning of this new century, no one has surpassed Duchamp. He understood earliest and best the role of art in postindustrial society. The only other visual artist who comes close to Duchamp is Paul Klee who understood better than anyone the relationship of language to art. When you look at the output of artists like Koons, Warhol and Duchamp using the types of metrics I have described, it is much easier to see how their reputations were established. It is not a good thing or a bad thing. It is just the way it works. We live in a corporate capitalist society. For an artist to use this information as a source of ideas for the creation of art makes perfect sense to me. It is nothing new. This business model reaches back to the fifteenth century. It is only the conscious awareness and use of this information as the main subject matter of the art artifact that is contemporary.

I: So, if you’re going to make art artifacts, make artifacts that have as their subject matter the underlying social and economic processes that establish their value in the first place.

A: That is one way to do it. That is what artists have always done. That is what portrait and religious painting in the Renaissance was all about. That is what decorative painting in Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was all about. That is what Modernism was all about. In one way Modernism was a search for artistic truth. In another way it was a textbook exercise in brand management. Today’s visual art comes in many forms that include movies, comics, video games, clothing and body art. Just as with painting or sculpture, some of this work qualifies as high art. For my part, I have made paintings and sculpture and books as art. And I have created software companies as art. Where the software companies are concerned, the infrastructure is the artifact. The lecture, interview and performance describing the process is the artifact. Writing about it and painting paintings about it after the fact is the artifact. That is why I pursue transmedia as an art form. Transmedia is art that begins in one domain, an image for example, and then passes through an interface of some sort and is transformed into an equivalent representation in a different domain -- sound or touch or taste to describe it in sensory terms. I have done this at the micro level which resulted in paintings, books, installations, performances and so forth, and at the macro level which resulted in software companies. The transformation does not have to be computer based. It can happen in any number of ways. And on either side of the transformation there will be a different set of values, structures and social contexts that may or may not share the same essential meaning.

I: If you don’t mind my saying so, that doesn’t seem to leave much room for the emotive or expressionistic.

A: I am not proposing an agenda such as Ad Reinhardt’s. It is not intended to be exclusionary or the be-all end-all of art. It is just one approach out of many.

I: Several years ago you started referring to your own artistic identity as a corporate artifact. Why did you do that?

A: Corporate means organized for the benefit of the shareholders, or party members, or citizens or whatever you want to call them. We think of a corporation as being economic in nature, since money is both a universal interface and a generalized reinforcement for almost all human behavior. But it is much more than that. It has become the principal means by which society is ordered. Ultimately, it determines most of our behaviors. At present, capitalism is the dominant politic and technology is its religion. It is as simple as that. Even corporatism is secondary to capitalism. That is not the way I would like it to be, but that is the way it is. And of course an artifact is a series of like events over time. Corporate artifacts are the time capsules of corporate capitalism. That is what I make. Corporate artifacts. I don’t do it to be cynical. I do it for love’s sake. If you call things what they are, you tend to become more careful about the why and the how of what you are doing. George Orwell’s “1984” is a corporate artifact. Picasso’s “Guernica” is a corporate artifact. Almost all of Duchamp’s later works are corporate artifacts. So is a cell phone. So are vacuum cleaners and automobiles. So is our current domestic and international policy, our government in fact. And so is this interview.

I: Perhaps the easier question is, What isn’t a corporate artifact?

A: Your most human characteristics. Your being and self-awareness. Your understanding of who and what you are and, if you so choose, even your thoughts and actions.

I: As a final question, could you look in your crystal ball and tell us where you think all of this is leading?

A: No one knows. No one ever will. But there is one thing that is of great concern to me. I believe that, from a moral point of view, human society is progressing in a slow, linear fashion. Technology, on the other hand, is progressing exponentially. Although we have had these particular bodies and brains for hundreds of thousands of years, we have operated as societies for less than fourteen thousand years. Since the 1960s we have had the technology to create a nuclear winter. Since the 1980s we have had the technology to extinct the human species through the use of viral bioweapons. Now we have genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. We are very near a point of absolute inflection. If we do not immediately come to terms with our moral responsibilities as human beings, we will not survive another thousand years of technological advancement.

I: What I hear you proposing is a narrative that pits emotion against reason or, more specifically, morality against science, in favor of science. It sounds to me like you are suggesting that the human species may be hardwired for its own extinction. I would like to hear how someone like Stanley Fish would deconstruct that argument.

A: When you deconstruct something, a narrative for example, what you are really doing is reverse engineering, from a given conclusion, an alternate chain of events that when read forward will lead to a same or similar conclusion, but for different reasons. This alternate narrative is only as valid as the facts, values and social consensus that underlie its own construction. The same critical processes that were applied to the original narrative can be applied to the new, deconstructed narrative. Not only can the deconstructed narrative in turn be deconstructed, but the original narrative can usually be deconstructed in many different ways. The strength of a narrative lies in its verifiability. There are such things as facts. Gravity is not the result of consensus formation. There is such a thing as truth and its opposite, untruth. Opinions are made of all these things in various combinations. One of the greatest responsibilities a human being has is to seek and know the differences and to act accordingly.

I: This has been a pretty long interview. I think we’ll stop now.

A: Ok.

I: Well, . . . thanks.

A: Thank you.