Markets are volatile, interest rates are high and start-up founders are beautiful little fools. With Ben Horowitz, Andreessen founded the world’s top private equity fund the same year that Europe’s leading art dealer, Iwan Wirth, opened his first New York venue in Chelsea. At mere suggestion that the sovereign debt crisis might be bad timing, the international gallery magnate reminded Art+Auction that he’d launched his empire in recession-struck 1992: “Now is also a fantastic moment to expand,” Wirth told ARTINFO in 2009, “I am not afraid of the current difficult climate and actually think we are in a great position.”
Techno-optimism is everything you hate about art but for venture. American Dynamism is everything you want out of an art movement but without the metaphors you live by. We are heading into a world where a flat-screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four-year college degree costs $1 million, but shares in Warhol will be worth more than Exxon in 50 years. The 50 Companies Shaping the Fight of the Future owe their authoritative vision to a shift in start-up fundraising that occurred in 2016 and that a16z has distilled to the very essence of willful indebtedness. To view the government as a key stakeholder in VC software startups solves the problem of having to first invent the appearance of a market that has a structure. Suddenly, the established product sectors disappear— and wow! Neoliberalism vanishes too. Interesting. Access to consumer environments that were previously off-limits for commercial development, like stem cell research, or public education, means its open season on art.
“We shouldn’t be fearful of productive new technologies,” Vance told the American Dynamists. “In fact, we should seek to dominate them.” The Vice President is absolutely right: U2’s With or Without You is a good overture to any riot, barring Kendall Jenner’s 2011 Pepsi commercial. I am an uncounted victim of the self-legitimating imagination of the happy few.
Critic Geoffrey Mak took note of the BMW parked on the third floor of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre for Art Basel Hong Kong. “Everyone was optimistic, and everyone was tired. Everyone was talking about tariffs.” Last month, the performance, no pun intended, of the Asian markets had the global art trade on the edge of their seats, waiting with baited breath, for some indication of how this is going to all go down. “Late takes on Abstract Expressionism – zombie formalism, and very good paintings by the likes of Albert Oehlen and Jacqueline Humphries – dominated the booths,” Mak reports. Yet what was clear at Art Basel was that Abstract Expressionist paintings, like capital, can travel anywhere in the world, to any context, any art fair, and still hold their value. By the week’s end, paintings by Asian abstract artists like Yayoi Kusama and Zeng Fanzhi went on to sell in the millions. The fair was going as planned. I found my friend, a DJ and sound artist based in Hong Kong, who had just done a live performance the night before at the M+ party I went to. “We were going to invite people from the audience to write notes on the installation as part of the performance, but they told us we couldn’t do that,” he said. “They thought people might write political slogans.” “Did you submit the proposal to the government for approval?” “No, it was the institution who said that,” he clarified. A cloud of self-censorship has settled over Hong Kong since the National Security Law was passed in June 2020, in response to protests reportedly attended by 1.7 million people – or 20% of Hong Kong’s population. The new law, which legalized the extradition of Hong Kong dissidents to be criminally tried in mainland China, deliberately uses vague language to keep people policing themselves; it’s anyone’s guess what can catch the censors’ tripwire. Everyone is an artist. The children of Gaza and Crayola are not mutually exclusive. Any future charter that envisions the development of the Gaza strip on a scope of class that is the World City will never exist apart from the familiar countries and it will never be a familiar country. The graveyard will be its museum district and the prison class its culture. As above, so below. Writes Fraser: “But what could this art be, this art that can’t exist within the field of art?” She’s afraid of this question, she’s afraid of the slop dished to only those who order tall, and the shame and humiliation of discovering that the Enlightenment really does look like this. Worse: that hers is only one of many deeply individualized perspectives. treating anything crypto-adjacent as leprous and only 26% of Republican voters think the President should be in charge of cultural institutions. Maybe “Marc Andreessen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ Is Just Old-School Reactionary Elitism.” Maybe it’s weekend painting. Trying to draw or represent a landscape without having to deal with real-world, figure-ground relationships is a popular activity. So is being able to launch and monetize a small, single function networked application without knowing a single line of code.Not knowing when to be creative and when to be obedient is the dyslexia of professionalisms. In the future, all children will be professionals. “We believe that technology ultimately drives the world to what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization” – what economists call ‘dematerialization,’” Andreessen attested in the 2023, self-published manifesto that’s become the bedrock of the American Dynamism investment fund. He quotes Fuller: “Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing,” adding that people are the ultimate resource. For Lacan, object loss is fundamentally linguistic even when the infant’s drool doesn’t speak most basic language of human demand: the English language. What “constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied” is symbolic, and the relationship of the symbolic to the structure of slop is what theoretico-psychoanalytico-academics serve in graduate schools as non-slop. For Nietzche, ressentiment is moral and so slop is also moral. If, today, the work of art, like the project of the state, is the reconstruction of slop— the slop of beauty, of authenticity, of America— then self-expression in the face of slop reshapes a system of identity that “lets you do more and more with less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” Thus moral outrage makes necessary the professional credentialling that finds slop a fitting means to a technologically rationalized end.
The 2025 edition of Asia’s largest art fair noted the presence of new clients from Southeast Asia garnered significant attention, as did collectors with the intent to establish Special Economic Zones (SEZ’s) within mainland China jurisdiction. “Attendance was excellent,” remarked one Berlin-based art dealer, “Visitors were particularly interested in the Picasso and Warhol works on display at our booth.”
Obama enabled 7 out of 10 of the most expensive art schools in the US to court a Millennial class that wanted to consume its own distinction in proportion to a mortgage. Students could take out loans from the federal government instead of a bank. In 2012, a significant number of trustees on the board of the Cooper Union were real estate operators; the decision to build a multi-billion dollar multi-use air conditioner where an architecture school used to be left the school at a deficit. Its institutional fabric shifted, teachers resigned, meanwhile, despite the uncertainty and volatility of arts education after 2008, the art school continued to receive the same number of applications. With SVU, NYU, The New School, and CUNY doing the same, liberal arts colleges competed with medical campuses in New York City to drive apartment rents into an upward, neverending spiral… Fifteen years later, it would appear that the Verso books section is starting to fall. Watching art workers have to deal with the shifts in federal policy is not fun. But checking my privilege was less fun. What’s unique to DEI policies is that these never come from those in charge of resource allocation, so by the time Obama and Biden signed many of the acts into formal law, most institutions were abiding by them voluntarily. What this tells us is that institutions do not decide: the networks decide. No, the Constitution isn’t racist. The exploitation of skin color is racist. Is race a constitutional requirement? Maybe it’s better to have racism than to have to answer that question, because if you do, you’re going to have find a way to explain it without being woke.