With the release of her new book, This Will Kill That (published by Stock), a visual and intellectual continuation of That Which is Priceless, Annie Le Brun attempts to dissect the tenuous connections between contemporary art and capital. Though it may be the last bulwark of our freedom, is art just as ensnared by money as the rest of society? At a time when some artists have become brands, represented by galleries that have become retailers, both with profits exceeding the one billion mark annually, has contemporary art become just another commodity or industry like any other? Annie Le Brun also explores what she calls the “colonization of our internal landscapes” by social media and our servitude with regard to the other – which we might even call a form of voluntary servitude – and shows that we now exist almost exclusively for and through images. In its monetized form in today’s society, this dictatorship of visibility is gradually tightening its grip upon our most inner selves.  

Armelle Leturcq: As art critics in the late 90s, we saw the art market transform and grow exponentially as new collectors emerged. They mostly came from new money and had a rather superficial knowledge of art, trusting the galleries instead of their own taste or sensibility. There is no denying it: for the most part, they are speculative collectors. For many, contemporary art has become first and foremost an investment. What do you think about this situation? 

Annie Le Brun: Something did happen around the 1990s which corresponds to the financialization of the economy, meaning the economic deregulation that led to general deregulation. The consequence of this was the spectacular affirmation in the artistic field of an « art of winners » for the « winners », as the German art critic Wolfgang Ullrich rightly defined it. And that served as a pretext for the so-called arbitrariness of art, which made it possible to impose an arbitrariness of value like never before. It essentially set up a wild sort of parallel stock exchange. That is the great plan of this type of « contemporary art », which has forced us to witness and also participate in the formidable transformation of art into money and money into art. 

In That Which is Priceless, you talk about a war waged against everything from which no value can be extracted, a war that involves the commodification of everything. Has art become a commodity like any other?

AL Unquestionably, and much more than that. It is a merchandise-means of conquest. It is one of the formidable weapons that the « victors » have used for some twenty years to « cleanse » the fragile terrain and have free reign to enforce and exalt the violence of money. In this respect, contemporary art is symbolic as a school of training. It is certainly not by chance that, from one capital to the next, we can now find the same artists in major museums and foundations, just as we can find the same products from the same brands all over the world. All the more so since the gigantism that characterizes this contemporary art teaches us to remain in a state of astonishment, meaning the suspension of any critical thinking. And it does so even as it overflows the museum space and accustoms us to its occupation of public space, in order to pursue its own strategy of privatization until it appears to us as a natural fact. In fact, it has practically succeeded in doing so already. This pedagogical function of contemporary art is an essential component in a domestication process for which we are the primary target. « Yes, to all. » Wasn’t that the slogan written in massive illuminated letters at the entry of the last FIAC art fair? 

According to you, a society based on controlling and standardizing mindsets is now taking shape, alongside a loss of liberties and voluntary servitude that is reaching new heights… In this perspective, what do you think of social media and the permanent performance of the self and  servitude with regard to the other that they engender? This « present without presence » that you evoke?  

AL This « present without presence » that is constantly imposed on us by the Internet has been accompanied and supported by the virtualization enacted and exalted through this « art of winners ». This is not unrelated to the establishment of the « dictatorship of visibility » in which we live today and whose major innovation is that is has merged both control and profit. The selfie is a striking example of this process of colonization through image. We are becoming more and more dependent on it, even as we believe we can find our freedom in it. This is the subject of the book This Will Kill That (to be published by Stock), which I have just finished in collaboration with Juri Armanda. In it, we show how we only exist through and for image. But an image that only exists according to the number of times it is viewed. In fact, it took only ten years or so for technology to revolutionize the status of the image, which now flood our screens daily by the billions. Thus, without our knowledge, the image is constantly stripped of its power of representation to become the victim of numbers, meaning the best agent of capital. It’s like a double agent which, in addition to serving an exponential increase in profit and control, works to confuse reality and fiction, and therefore to completely subjugate us.

Thus the idealized figure of the artist who is now seen as a sort of demigod, which makes them omnipotent and above the law. What do you think about that? 

AL It is unquestionably from this intensive collusion of money and capital that the « contemporary » artist obtains this new untouchable posture. More than anyone else, the artist is the incarnation and source of visibility, since they invent from nothing a sign that is recognizable to everyone. But we have to remember that this is done at the expense of any representation. It is not far off from the act of creating a brand with its own logo. It is also remarkable that the most famous contemporary artists manage their careers and their production like corporate directors, employing entire teams working alongside them. In the same way, it seems like collectors and investors in art have joined artists in a sort of competition. And rightly so, since both must aim for ever more visibility to generate ever more profit.

In France art galleries are sometimes subsidized since the government buys art from galleries, rather than buying directly from artists. What do you think about the relationship between the art market and the government? The government believes it is necessary to support the French art market before the artists themselves, as if an artwork that has not entered the market has no value, and that an artist without a gallery cannot be a real artist. What do you think about all this?

AL It’s interesting to note how, even though they should be opposed to it, cultural professionals, and especially the leaders of museums, institutions and foundations, have in a short time become the zealous propagators of this financialization of art. Most of them do not hesitate to become true cultural DJs who program exhibitions and events, like gigantic experiments carried out on a global scale to demonstrate that the content of the image is less important than its visibility. This is how, among others, Jean-Luc Martinez, the president of the Louvre, joined forces with Airbnb to promote a night spent in the company of the Mona Lisa. Proof that the most famous works of art have status and value similar to a brand. This is the context in which the sinister trend of « dialogue » is taking hold in almost all the world’s major museums, which are becoming the site where art history is held hostage to legitimize the ongoing commodification of everything. It must be said that cultural policies around the world are increasingly determined by this spectacle of false equivalence between masterpieces that are presumed to be priceless and artworks which are, on the other hand, pure products of financial speculation. It’s clear that an artist who seeks the unknown has no place within this system. The whole range of possibilities that may arise from representation is excluded. Such operations are carried out between businesses, which are increasingly adept at playing on all the formal connections between works coming from artists, eras or civilizations whose connection only serves to gain visibility, at the price of their neutralization.

What about the beauty that you refer to as « questioning what is » or « breaking down the order of things »? Beauty is a completely erased question in the contemporary art world today, which privileges conceptual art and the artist’s approach rather than the result. What do you think about it?

AL It is of course the intrusive force of living beauty that is prevented by today’s standards. One could even consider contemporary art as the ultimate device for achieving this exclusion, through « performances » and « installations ». The words are revealing: « performance » referring to a celebration of the quantitative order, while the « installation » puts us each time in front of an established fact. Here we find the two foundations of the brutality that characterizes contemporary art through what I have called « globalist realism » whose monumental nature leaves no doubt about its aims of domination. As for the discourse that inevitably accompanies this type of intervention, it is more like an explanatory note than any sort of conceptual art. Is it not intended to convince us of the absence of a given meaning in a work designed to escape representation? In this sense, contrary to what we are led to believe, contemporary art constitutes a hijacking of conceptual art to the benefit of capital. It is no longer a question of concepts but of protocols all aiming to make us accept the key principle of neoliberalism, namely that there is no alternative. In this sense, it is remarkable that what is supposed to be beautiful is now rejected from artistic activity so that it can be controlled and systematically exploited exclusively through the fashion and luxury industries. Even so, we are right to point out the new collusion between fashion, art and finance.  First of all, it is the same capital, and this collusion involves a division of the fields of exploitation, based on the principle of parceling, which presides over all commodification. While it is contemporary art that dazzles the mind to prevent any critical distance through a production of sensations comparable to special effects, it is fashion that is now carrying out an unprecedented sensory formatting of society from top to bottom. If I speak of « synthetic beauty », it’s because beauty now exists only through the image of its commodification.  This is notably on display with the « airport beauty » presented in duty free shops around the world, which function as the global showcase for this aesthetic of globalization that is inseparable from brands and where everything is formatted.

Aesthetic formatting, standardization of sensibilities… What remains of beauty from below, such as traditional customs or local practices? Is it all under threat?

AL Yes, but not only through this hegemony of formatted aesthetics, but just as much through the appropriation of all particularities and the exploitation of all possible uniqueness, leading to their definitive neutralization as they become mere signs among other signs. In this sense, the fashion market is the best example of mass personalization, which is now the prerogative of online shopping as a source of profit and control, but also as an infallible predictive weapon, capable of targeting each of us among billions of individuals, in order to dictate our lives which are reduced to interchangeable lifestyles.

Is that what you are referring to when you talk about a “colonization of our internal landscapes”?

AL Of course. But we cannot overlook the fact that it all began with contemporary art, extending through fashion and the luxury industries and accounting for the astonishing alienation that took shape through image in order to turn us into its ultimate prisoners. The forthcoming book expands on what I observed in That Which is Priceless. And we were taken by a kind of vertigo by seeing how the image, which for centuries has opened all the doors for us, is now systematically closing them again.

To keep us from thinking? Like what’s happening now with Covid?

AL If in This Will Kill That, begun about two years ago, we were led to take the frightening measure of this lockdown by the image and within the image, not without noticing in passing the importance of contemporary art in this affair, the pandemic has unfortunately come to confirm what could have passed for dystopian speculation on our part.

Can boredom, daydreaming, and drifting still offer escapes in the face of domesticated behaviors and from this situation in general?

AL The problem is that through the function of the double agent, which is now how the image operates, it is first of all our imagination that is threatened, with everything happening as if the essential source is itself poisoned. This is why the most important thing is to become aware of it first. We can only hope that by seeing where and how things and our horizon close in and form a prison without walls for each of us, some of us can still begin to imagine the distant if not the infinite that perhaps still inhabits us.