The Future of Art

(Reported in occasion of the conference within the curated exhibition Truth, Beauty, Freedom & Money in K11 Art Space, Shanghai)

To begin with, I would like to share about my perspective of the exhibition title, which borrowed from media artist and researcher Michael Naimark. But before I learn it, I understand it in my own way, as that Money which guaranteed and generated by the neoliberal scandalous rhetoric Freedom is fiercely and overtly dragged our notion of Truth and Beauty of our age into another direction. Which I think is totally different compares to last century after the first public museum has established by French people. Theres a fundamental idea, which all Marxism theorists would never left behind, suggests the concurrency between infrastructure and superstructure, as we all know. When it comes to art, if we consider about its future, we starts from its infrastructure just as what Benjamin did when he prognoses photography in the beginning of modernist era. By infrastructure, I am considering both technical base that supported art as its media as well as its information in some respect, and also economic base, for we as homo economicus all rely on it. And Im here to talk about the second part and I see it as the main reason that its superstructure has thus shifted its ethos paradigmatically from criticality to creativity. Allow me to first remind you about the similar time frame as Zhenhuas concept, that it is now 2013, roughly 20 years since the right-wing bourgeois had overtaken the critical agency of institutional criticism, according to Hito Steyerl; and 15 years after Harald Szeemann, the first independent curator who participated as a juror in the controversial but influential institution called Chinese Contemporary Art Award, which was founded by his collector friend; 5 years ago, artist Anton Vidokle and curator Tirdad Zolghadr submitted themselves to prosecution, for they colluded with the bourgeoisie. As the timeline for art becomes almost completely an instrument of capitalist power, there are only 2 years remain as predicted by Maria Lind in 2005 on the occasion of and supported by the Frieze Art Fair in London. Contemporary art is currently undergoing an unprecedented structural transformation through an injection of economic vitality that dominates and molds the features of art: it is the period that we are encountering the most art institutions, systems of collection, the most abundance in exhibitions and artists as well as art schools and art students. In the past 20 years along the current of privatization, the featured exhibitions that took place in apartments

and the consular district of Beijing and in alternative spaces of Taipei have all retreated to galleries, museums, and biennials. During almost the same time, our notion of art also experienced an interesting shift. The ethos of art moved away from the position of resistance, which contributed by our modernist avant-garde predecessors. Artists become distributors of imaginations rather than a critical agent; their expression to the audiences through their art work that was once rebellion and interrogation in the content of the work gradually tilted to be kind of free drifting which is we found it poetic and contemplative. This does not represent that art no longer strive to resist and to be critical. Speaking of quantity alone, perhaps it has been more numerous than the previous 20 years. The difference be that the methodology and tactic that artists use is re-adjusted into a top-down procedure. For another, with regard to the scale of production, artists no longer solely rely on individual effort to complete the production of their works. Instead, they mobilize assistants, inter-personal relationships as well as interdisciplinary and cross institutional cooperation in so far as possessing the means to integrate mass media and fund raising. Through the development of division of labor, integrated by capital, todays artists possess a diversity of methodology, which is unprecedented in comparison to their predecessors. While artists are able to subvert the human sense perception in the most edgy ever way, if we can no longer use the term radical, it seems, the routes of criticality could only effectively works from above. Just as curator Charles Esche once said in an interview that many of the artists start telling stories again in order to explore meaning. Artist nowadays, devoted to restoring the strange web of space and time, namely, the privileged sign. Here comes a new breed of institution, where artists integrate people, events and objects which cross a range of space and time, through new media, traditional artistry even antiques with material in physical reach or by transnational allocation of resources giving art narrative material distinct from the past.