Let us not mince words – today, the avantgardes of the past are as concentration camp “prisoner functionaries” (collaborationist kapos) in the service of cultural totalitarianism. Where once “museums” of non-objective art served as provisional headquarters of an internationalist, insurrectional movement, now resides the accumulated transnational power of Cultural Capital – New York, London, Paris, Prague, Venice, Bilboa, Moscow, Dubai, Beijing – corporatized in the image of “blockbuster” spectacularism. It is past time to call these monstrous trivialisations of creative life what they truly are. These Disneyfied kulturgulags represent what amounts to a Final Solution of the “avantgarde problem” – the integrated liquidation & expropriation of avantgarde forms of resistance & subversion, to the programme of total commodification of creative life. No longer is “contemporary art” permitted to challenge the established status quo or the vested interests of cultural capitalism: it has instead become the décor of an “institutionalised revolution.” The revolution of the commodity – of the very idea of the “new” itself – of the absolutely modern. In this alienated form, the future of “art” is reduced to a zero-sum parody of cashless emancipation. KUNSTARBEIT MACHT FREI.
ALIENIST MANIFESTO 