"There’s a word I really like: “art-washing”. It describes the way contemporary art – because it’s perceived as an innovative force, the bearer of a critical spirit and, in fact, “freedom” – is being used by autocratic regimes to accumulate symbolic power and show some degree of openness. In the Gulf States there are enclaves with unrestricted freedom of expression – galleries and museums – surrounded by cities where it is banned. Then there are transnational corporations that practice soft-power: think of George Soros and his Open Society foundation that uses art in Eastern Europe to promote democracy and a cosmopolitan and progressive society, but by cultivating consumerist values. It’s impossible to make clear-cut judgments: Soros is doing important work, but bundling it together with a specific capitalist structure has some questionable features. The real difference from the CCF is not ideological, but transparent: people know where the money comes from. The whole of bourgeois culture, from a Marxist perspective, is art-washing: it constructs an idea of “humanity” and “progress” to conceal the dark sides of the system of production. The modernist idea of history – and probably this discussion would be even more fruitful in architecture than painting – was to find new roles for art, to change the world. Today, critical art is a way of producing cultural literacy. This is why institutions are fundamental. Artists produce their work in the history of which they’re a part. Because they’re not agents of amnesia but promoters of a knowledge that translates indirectly into political awareness. And we know how greatly this awareness is essential today to everyone, and not just to identifiable and classifiable minorities or identities." Anselm Franke @Domus Web.
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