Walter Hopps foi um importante curador americano que era conhecido por trabalhar durante a madrugada e escondido em lugares alternativos. Em ironia a seus estranhos hábitos, sua equipe produziu um cartaz que dizia “Walter Hopps estará aqui em 20 minutos”. Fazendo alusão ao trabalho importante de curadores como Walter Hopps, o artista brasileiro Rafael RG, criou estas faixas escritas: “Hans Ulrich Obrist estará aqui em 20 minutos”.

[via]

Jan Yoors.

Eu não sou boa de traduções, por isso recortei o excelente texto do Boris Groys ( e fiz uma obra de arte contemporânea, rs.) para mostrar como o trabalho imaterial – após Duchamp conceituar a arte como ideia em seus “readymades” – difunde o pensamento pós-fordista na Internet.

During the nineteenth century, painting and sculpture were seen as extensions of the artist’s body, as evoking the presence of this body even following the artist’s death. Since at least Duchamp and his use of the readymade, this situation has changed drastically. And the main change lies not so much in the presentation of industrially produced objects as artworks, as in a new possibility that opened for the artist, to not only produce artworks in an alienated, quasi-industrial manner, but also to allow these artworks to maintain an appearance of being industrially produced.

The artist becomes a bearer and protagonist of “ideas,” “concepts,” or “projects,” rather than a subject of hard work, whether alienated or non-alienated work. Accordingly, the digitalized, virtual space of the internet has produced phantom concepts of “immaterial work” and “immaterial workers” that have allegedly opened the way to a “post-Fordist” society of universal creativity free from hard work and exploitation. In addition to this, the Duchampian readymade strategy seems to undermine the rights of intellectual private property—abolishing the privilege of authorship and delivering art and culture to unrestricted public use.

But to what degree is such a project realistic? Is liberation from labor even possible? Indeed, contemporary art confronts the traditional Marxist theory of value production with a difficult question: if the “original” value of a product reflects the accumulation of work in this product, then how can a readymade acquire additional value as an artwork—notwithstanding the fact that the artist does not seem to have invested any additional work in it?

The expansion of this seemingly immaterial art practice into the whole economy by means of the internet has produced the illusion that a post-Duchampian liberation from labor through “immaterial” creativity—and not the Marxist liberation of labor—opens the way to a new utopia of creative multitudes.

In this way, the internet provides us with an interesting combination of capitalist hardware and communist software. Hundreds of millions of so-called “content producers” place their content on the internet without receiving any compensation, with the content produced not so much by the intellectual work of generating ideas as by the manual labor of operating the keyboard. And the profits are appropriated by the corporations controlling the material means of virtual production.

Google’s search engine operates by fragmenting individual texts into a non-differentiated mass of verbal garbage: each individual text traditionally held together by its author’s intention is dissolved, with individual sentences then fished out and recombined with other floating sentences allegedly having the same “topic.” Of course, the unifying power of authorial intention had already been undermined in recent philosophy, most notably by Derridean deconstruction.

There is, however, a difference between deconstruction and googling: deconstruction was understood by Derrida in purely “idealistic” terms as an infinite, and thus uncontrollable practice, whereas Google’s search algorithms are not infinite, but finite and material—subjected to corporate appropriation, control, and manipulation

However, even the most average, “normal” everyday people now permanently document their own working bodies by means of photography, video, websites, and so forth. And on top of that, contemporary everyday life is exposed not only to institutional surveillance, but also to a constantly expanding sphere of media coverage.

The artist today shares art with the public just as he or she once shared it with religion or politics. To be an artist has ceased to be an exclusive fate; instead, it has become characteristic of society as a whole on its most intimate, everyday, bodily level. [trechos do texto: Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies]

Belo trabalho de Martin Boyce inspirado nas árvores de concreto dos irmãos Martel.