Night of the Living Dead Author

...Consumption determines production...

As soon as the legitimation crisis of the institutions that contain the discourse of visual culture seemed to be overcome-not by a resolution of their increasingly apparent contradictions and conflicts of interest, of course, but by a rigid sociopolitical reconstitution of traditional hierarchies and the aesthetic myths that adorn them /- -/ the radical practice of artists of Asher's generation could be marginalized to the extent that the work was made to appear h istorical before it had even properly entered the culture.

The death of the Author (R. Barthes 1968) ...famously declares the author as no longer the unique source of meaning and/or value of a work of art... For art to merit a degree of critical integrity today, as over the past thirty years... it must seem to acknowledge this most "postmodern" declaration........Today's artists too often only posture an address to this declaration... by using appropriative and quotational techniques... cashing in on inherited "postmodernist" legacies... pastiching pastiches... cartooning the allegory... Witness the simplistic mis-understanding of theory by Art Club 2000... whose alternative posturing and highly commodified dissent hides smugly behind a facade of consensus... Mariko Mori's practice of modeling herself on heroines from manga and anime ....Vanessa Beecroft's signature presentation of uniformly stripped young women in the vein of fashion... and Matthew Barney's Nike romanticism of sports and mythology... without so much as a wee bit of criticism of these forms or industries...........A vast number of artists build careers around a particular facet of an already determined culture ...(i.e., fashion, film, advertising, television, music, science, history, politics)...These artists seem to side with the death of authorship by attaching themselves to some meaningful source...but mean only to reclaim the spoils of authorship...by creating an identity inseparable from their work... continuing to supply the system without attempting to change it...We have learned by now that a work by Sherrie Levine is immediately a "Sherrie Levine"...a Cindy Sherman is a "Cindy Sherman"...a Richard Prince is a "Richard Prince".......Today's artists, nurtured under the sensational auteurs of 80's dead-authorship...feed,like zombies, on the reeking corpse of those strategies...which have defined more than a decade's worth of commercially successful art....Artists who fashion a product of faux antagonism... towards authorship while structuring a career based on capitulation....to the market's authorities...and propagating a signature style... ignore the issues germane to the invention of those strategies... as well as of art today ...namely the oppressive circumstances of consumption determined production....These are the Living Dead Authors ...and the art industry is in the somnolent obscurity of their night.

...When I hear the word checkbook, I take out my culture... (more Artclub here: http://www.societyofcontrol.com/x404/ac2k_all/main.htm )