An Exhibition on Capitalist Art
perhaps Till Wasserpest
What is called art today is no longer a commodity in any simple sense.
It is a language – and this language is ideologically formed.
Not because art is sold, but because it has learned
how one must speak in order to be allowed to persist.
The decisive mechanisms are not prices or relations of ownership,
but formats: legibility, connectivity, situational critique,
controlled deviation.
Art is therefore no longer a place, but a mode of conduct.
It shapes subjects long before it asserts meanings.
For this reason, art today can no longer be a critique of capitalism.
Not because critique is absent,
but because the very mode of production already speaks
the logic of the system it claims to criticize.
Not in a blatant or affirmative way,
but subtly, elegantly, unmarked.
The ideological does not lie in the content,
but in the syntax.
In the self-evidence
with which everything appears as material:
world, relation, suffering, crisis, more-than-human life.
The contemporary exhibition world is not a special case in this regard.
It is a training ground.
Here, nothing is sold;
instead, one practices
how to address the world without touching it.
How to name everything without letting anything remain.
How to thematize violence
without assuming responsibility.
Capitalism needs no censorship here.
It needs only a language
in which everything can be said,
as long as nothing binds.
Animals, landscapes, destroyed habitats
are not placed in relation,
but rendered available –
aesthetically, discursively, morally.
Even critique is not suppressed,
but kept exploitable.
The problem, therefore, is not the art market.
The problem lies deeper:
in a humanity
that has learned
to treat everything outside itself
as an instrumental exterior –
and to mistake this attitude
for reflection.
The world no longer appears as a shared world,
but as a topic.
As an occasion.
As a resource.
Art that speaks this language
does not withdraw from capitalism.
It enacts it.
Not out of malice,
but out of practice.
A humanity that speaks in this way
will not lose the world.
It has already replaced it.