RND/ A scenario, in which the trouble with (/the idea of) “selling conceptual art [1] online” seems precisely the conceptual / neural gap between the (/modern) notions of “Ideas” and “Worth”: a failed Kickstarter [2] image with clay head.
This Is Your Head: Selling Conceptual Art Online
Two cognitive threads seem to be running computationally parallel (or crossed in short circuit): one feels somewhat sorry for the minor, foggy dreams of this Kickstarter wannabe – and simultaneously scoffs at the mere notions such campaigns rest on – which feel laughably unstructured and vaporous. [3]
This seems due to the common feeling nowadays that “Ideas aren’t worth anything” [4] – only their ‘concrete execution’ – conveniently forgetting the whole violent notion of “Intellectual Property” which forcibly welds theory and material / Capitalist ‘concrete’ (ie. ideological) execution (/as in ‘killing’) together into an inseparable / material condition of modern synthetic existence.
Indeed, a concrete block [5] seems the essential example of idea in material form: ie. “Consider concrete the mere idea of concrete made concrete.”
Yet for many potential backers of strange, conceptually (ie. ideas) inclined Kickstarters the notion one might simply give away one’s hard earned electronic zeros and ones for ‘mere ideas’ seems preposterous – cherry picking which socio-economic virtualities / simulations and material immaterial-conditions and mis-relationships are concrete, and which are intangibly abstract.
The key underlying notion here of course is “Real”: the sense that the mere notion of ‘conceptual art’ isn’t at nearly as real as the real (ie. immaterial yet all too concrete) social relationship of / imposed by global electric finance.
That is, ideas have or express extreme efficacy – symbolic fictions [6] possessing actual, real world effects and implications (both material and theoretical) – in this regard, the strange talking clay heads of Kickstarters seem to require ‘real™ placebos’ [7] before parting with their concrete, matrix-floating Capital.
In short, big-kick starting finance once again repeats its old hard-sell line that “It just works” [8] – for those who can already afford it.
—
Example Reference Links
-
- Crowdfunding As A Continuous ‘Drip’ Activity
- Spectator: Defending Conceptual Art
- Classic Kickstarter Failure: “I want to make a game”
- Verso Books: All that is solid melts into air
- Inc.com – Why your idea isn’t worth anything
- Wikipedia: Concrete masonry unit
- Academia.edu – Zizeks’s Guide To Cinema
- The Skeptical Zone – “I refute it thus”
- Counterpunch.org – Freedom and Capitalism
- Calculating The Hyperreal Financial Concept of ‘Worth’
// how to play big science