Gil Pasternak, Still, digital print, 2003.
Contemporary art can hardly formulate or carry out the political options that could challenge the reality of neo-liberal capitalism. Its subject of democratic change is reduced to an opportune consumerist horde for which the culturally mediated illusion of freedom is more than sufficient. Politically insistent art actually improves this illusion by sustaining the informational fetishism and the naive notion of art as a sacred realm of (individual) freedoms.
The idea of politics as artistic realm belongs to the concept of cultural pluralism that obscures the role of contemporary art in the global promotion of cultural production as a new domain of economy.
Conflicts of interest within that domain establish the rules of social games in which the politics is not addressed as such, while superficial thematization of politics without critical awareness of its complex ideological structure turns art into a tranquilizing agent. As long as it emerges predominantly from within the cultural strategies, the problem of art production is not some particular political issue but the very position of art. In other words, art is not culture and only by prevailing it, art can reach the event horizon whose (political) relevance could be regarded seriously.
Mutiny and Bounty, exhibition catalogue, FLU Gallery Belgrade / The Agency Contemporary London, 2003.