2H2K - August 2050 - #adviceforyoungjournalists - An Introduction:

The Craven Family, Peter Manzel (2001)

When I started working on this series of short stories about the second half [2H] of the 21st Century [2K] I asked my friend Felix Salmon: "What kind of company would the 'Felix Salmon of 2050' work for, and what will he be doing?" This was well before Felix was "post-text" - well before there were even rumblings of him leaving Reuters (the only job I had ever know him in up until then). I asked Felix because I trying not to imagine dystopian 2050, but instead, I had set myself a more difficult goal: to imagine a "well-paid middle-class lifestyle down the road." Since then I have tried to imagine a future in which there is a place for Felixes, lots of them. He is not the type of person I have had in mind as I've written these stories - he is EXACTLY the person I have had in mind. So I was not surprised when he advised young journalists yesterday: "if you’re more career-oriented, and want a good chance at a well-paid middle-class lifestyle down the road... if you enter the journalism profession today, have probably never been lower." The reason I wasn't surprised, is because it agreed with the answer Felix gave me to my question over a year ago; an answer that didn't discourage me, but pointed me in the direction I have taken with these stories.

Spot Markets

Of vitrine and vitriol; the cynical mariage of art and commerce: 

Jeff Koons, Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), New Wet/Dry Tripledecker (1981); 

Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years (1990)
(Return to Introduction)

"Art is bought and sold, but it is more than a commodity." I plucked this quote from the comment thread below a Ben Davis post about the economics of being an artist (or lack-there-of). This sort of hand wringing reached it's hight within art world critical theory circles during the 1990s when A-list art theorists like Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh made their careers casting doubt on the cynical "commodity aesthetics" of the late 1980s. By then the anxiety was already a century in the making and it while it has waxed and waned, it has remained a central concern. But right now there is new urgency to the question of "art's commodity status" in the wake of the circus surrounding Damien Hirst's Complete Spot Paintings. And with that new urgency there is a renewed desire to stake some special ground for art. A territory outside of, or above the vulgar and banal market floor. I believe this is an understandable, but short-sighted strategy. Art isn't more than a commodity. Art is a commodity. To see a thing for what it is, now, and not what it should be, isn't defeatist, it is the only way to anticipate what a thing can possibly become. And because art can and does function according to market forces, is not a victory for the cynics. Art behaves differently than all other commodities and all other markets.