The Business: On the Unbearable Lightness of Art

"Not only are art “practice” and various art “activities” held up as paradigms of a new typology of production and productivity in contemporary creative capitalism, but the figure of the artist himself has now become the linchpin of a new culture of entrepreneurship and management that is predicated, in part, upon the precept that work is everywhere and nowhere at the same time; that we are always working and never at work; that life, work, and—in the artist’s case—art can no longer be distinguished from each other in any meaningful sense.


[…]

All of this is made both possible and acceptable (not to mention, more troublingly, desirable) because of our implicit allegiance to the old utopian ideal, so crucial to avant-garde ideology, of the dissolution of art into life, which is itself one of the basic tenets of the socialist vision of a laborless society, a world in which everyone will be free to pursue happiness in a creative fashion modeled, ultimately, after the ideal of art and artisthood. (Entry into the art world is conditional upon our swearing allegiance to this idyll, i.e., upon our accepting the fact that what we will be “doing” the rest of our lives will be something other than work.) But the unrelenting business of the art world is also enabled by its structural reliance on various social networks, on the creative repurposing of human relations as artistic material and/or artistic content, of “relating” as a line of work (that of the it’s-not-what-you-know-it’s-who-you-know variety): you may be thinking you are enjoying some elevated dinner conversation, but you are actually working; you may be thinking you are working, but you are actually just enjoying your dinner—whichever way you want it, you are always busy."


interesting i came across this while reading about Miyamoto Mushashi. such talk, i think, would annoy him...