- Highlight Loc. 93-95 | Added on Wednesday, December 05, 2012, 01:48 PM
The scale at which images proliferate and the speed with which they travel have never been greater. Under these conditions, images appear to be free, but they carry a price.
- Highlight Loc. 187-89 | Added on Wednesday, December 05, 2012, 02:08 PM
with the “migrant object,” the right of possession does not depend on either cultural commonality or special knowledge, but rather on pure empathy. Consequently, its relation to its original site may be easily severed in order to release it into free and unfettered markets.
- Highlight Loc. 195 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 02:18 PM
Native objects are absolutely site specific: if displaced they are said to be maimed, rendered meaningless.
- Highlight Loc. 196-97 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 02:22 PM
Finally, there is the documented object, whose relationship to its original site or “find spot” (which is technically known as a provenience) has been properly studied to produce an informational or documentary value.
- Highlight Loc. 206-8 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 02:22 PM
Images might become forms of currency that do not conform to the monetary (like many forms of communication). Because they emerge in an “information era” where documentation is virtually inherent in the production of art, contemporary artworks typically belong to the category of documented objects.
- Highlight Loc. 228-30 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 02:29 PM
According to Benjamin, aura results from site specificity. It is because the work of art belongs to a “time and space” that it can possess the authority of a witness. Reproduction jeopardizes “the historical testimony” and the “authority of the object.”
- Highlight Loc. 231-32 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 02:29 PM
But as Benjamin was well aware, one of the primary aesthetic and political struggles of modernity has been the dislocation of images from any particular site
- Highlight Loc. 233-35 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 02:34 PM
Images are no longer and probably can never again be site specific, as Benjamin diagnosed, which means that instead of witnessing history, they constitute its very currency.
- Highlight Loc. 251-54 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 02:46 PM
One could say, following the Comaroffs and contra Benjamin, that it is saturation through mass circulation—the status of being everywhere at once rather than belonging to a single place—that now produces value for and through images (and not only in “ethno-commodities”). Instead of a radiating nimbus of authenticity and authority underwritten by site specificity, we have the value of saturation, of being everywhere at once. In place of aura, there is buzz.
- Highlight Loc. 283-85 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 03:08 PM
The emergent image is a dynamic form that arises out of circulation. As such, it is located on a spectrum between the absolute stasis of native site specificity on the one hand, and the absolute freedom of neoliberal markets on the other.
- Highlight Loc. 290-92 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 03:09 PM
This is what the contemporary global artwork must be: an emissary, whose power arises out of cultural translation rather than avant-garde innovation, a form of international currency that can cross borders effortlessly.
- Highlight Loc. 414-15 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 04:20 PM
these tactics underemphasize what is represented in order to accentuate the relationship between discrete images and their framing networks.
- Highlight Loc. 568-71 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2012, 04:52 PM
Simply put, a format is a heterogeneous and often provisional structure that channels content. Mediums are subsets of formats—the difference lies solely in scale and flexibility. Mediums are limited and limiting because they call forth singular objects and limited visual practices, such as painting or video. Mediums are analogue in a digital world. Formats regulate image currencies (image power) by modulating their force, speed, and clarity.
- Highlight Loc. 589-93 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 09:05 AM
what now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting. What counts, in other words, is how widely and easily images connect: not only to messages, but to other social currencies like capital, real estate, politics, and so on. In economies of image overproduction connectivity is key.
- Highlight Loc. 614-16 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 09:08 AM
in informational economies of overproduction, value is derived not merely from the intrinsic qualities of a commodity (or other object), but from its searchability—its susceptibility to being found, or recognized (or profiled). This explains why contemporary art marginalizes the production of content in favor of producing new formats for existing images
- Highlight Loc. 741-42 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 09:43 AM
Here is a paradox: public service is elided with the accumulation of wealth. This connection—between accumulation and democracy—is the format of American museums.
- Highlight Loc. 749-50 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 09:44 AM
In other words, the American museum is engaged in a massive money-laundering operation: turning finance capital into cultural capital and putting a democratic face on the accumulation of wealth—all exempt from taxes!
- Highlight Loc. 754-56 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 09:46 AM
For upper-class elites, museums justify accumulation as democratic; for large general audiences, the museum makes wealth fascinating, and hence culturally legitimate. It is no wonder that, in an era when the division between rich and poor has never been greater worldwide, museums are proliferating wildly.
- Highlight Loc. 769-70 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 09:55 AM
it is now impossible to build a truly global career as an artist without a high quotient of connectivity bordering on the status of a brand.
- Highlight Loc. 880-81 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 10:36 AM
As both commodity and experience, art is the paradigmatic object of globalization—it occupies the vanguard in an economy hungry for authenticity.
- Highlight Loc. 927-30 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 07:22 PM
Under the conditions of ubiquitous image saturation, modern art’s purpose as a vanguard for the promotion of and research into how images constitute secular knowledge—and particularly self-knowledge or the anthropological knowledge of others—lost its urgency since everyone who inhabits contemporary visual culture assumes the complex communicative capacity of images to be self-evident.
- Highlight Loc. 930-33 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 07:23 PM
As a consequence, “art,” defined as a private creative pursuit leading to significant and profitable discoveries of how images may carry new content, has given way to the formatting and reformatting of existing content—to an Epistemology of Search. The major consequence of this shift is that art now exists as a fold, or disruption, or event within a population of images—what I have defined as a format.
- Highlight Loc. 946-49 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 07:27 PM
In a world saturated with highly sophisticated entertainment industries including computer games, websites like YouTube and Vimeo, phones and tablets that perform as mobile multimedia platforms, films, and television, not to mention the enhanced capacity of travel and tourism by which the desire for exotic experiences is projected onto foreign cultures, art is just one of many producers of alternative realities