Art is an affirmation of their cynical and spiritually bereft positions as purveyors of this economy, in as much as it is a negation, a denial of the vitality of life and death. What has changed more than the art itself in the last 30,000 years is the consciousness of artists and how they conceive of art. With the economic and technological evolutions western history has brought us, we have seen art adapt and become but one aspect of a techno-economic production system first put into play by Christianity, then later by the more modern forms of capitalism in Europe and North America to the point today where art is but a new form of cultural and economic neo-colonialist output in the form of biennials and art fairs where in an effort to attain “cultural and political legitimacy”, countries in Asia, South America, and Africa assimilate into the western art game.
But this evolution was always present in the work and the will of the prehistoric artist, in the human being’s attempt at mastery and efficiency that gave rise to technical innovation. What has since changed are the stakes of our objectification of the planet, the environment, and our totalization of both humanity and the natural worlds. We can no longer afford to be so far removed from our natures as material artists working with physis and psyche in a symbiotic relationship. The totalization and objectification of the other, of the world outside us removes us from the biological and instills within us an ethic of the ego, or the egological at great cost. The apotheosis of this detachment, of this dematerialization, is the computer and electronic art that simulates all material into light and data is the most advanced form of this detachment from life and death.

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Notes

1.It is important to remember the distinction between “our” technologized and commodified world whose roots lie in Europe and whose development now stems from American corporatism, with its modern economies, technologies, and militaries and the so-called “other” pre-industrialized isolated worlds still more or less removed from the “modern” or “postmodern” world of globalization. This distinction is critical to an understanding of how art is practiced differently by such peoples as Australian Aborigines, native Canadians, and Pacific Islanders, for example, neither of whom escape the vortex of contemporary capitalism as their works are highly commodified. The height of irony here is that these works, created by cultures still much more in contact with life and death, with their material and spiritual surroundings, are relegated to the lower realm of “craft” or “indigenous art” by the capitalist-centric purveyors of contemporary and modern art, oblivious to the neo-colonialist conceits such evaluations embody.