Jim Costanzo / REPO History, Wall Street, 1992
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for the record, I’m not american. Brian Holmes is:
“The hardest thing for an American artist to remember is that creativity is not strictly private, like a piece of property or a message in a secret code. The first reason why this is so hard to remember is that the “creative class” in America is all about golden boys, glamor girls, copyright and cash payoffs, it’s about prestige, power and privilege among the elites. And the second reason is that the spectacle of this privatized creativity is so hard to swallow that black bile is the most comon gastric reaction for most thinking and feeling people. The hardest thing for an American artist with a conscience is to make work that’s not wound up into a compact ball of resentment beneath an indecipherable dystopian skin. But there’s still a need and an overwhelming desire for art that’s lucidly open, fearless, critical and beautiful, showing every possibility of existence and collective transformation within the cracks and the fissures of the declining machine…
…What does it mean to be a derivative? As the public at large is now learning, a financial derivative is a mathematical formula that reorganizes a simple promise of payment into a complex bundle of eventualities and obligations that are calculated to become profitable under certain conditions of the future. The shocking thing is how much we, as artists and cultural producers, have become derivatives of these formulas. In New York City we are constantly confronted with the figure of the trader whose mathematical wit makes money out of thin air. The trader, the banker and the investment broker are the masters of the semiotic economy, which is made purely of images and signs. This model of the financial wizard is supposed to be replicated in the semiotic realm of art, except there, what you’re supposed to conjure up for state and corporate managers are the emotions, the desires, the insights and the imagination of the public…
…A massive crisis like the one that has begun right now makes that double process of research and expression both possible and urgent. On the one hand, every radical cultural producer now has the chance and, I think, the responsibility of extending their inquiry to the vast new worlds of complexity, and often of insanity, that have come into being all over the earth, at the deliriously accelerated speeds of computerized trading.”
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I don’t know enough about economics to answer this question, but maybe someone else does – i think it broke because people made money out of nothing (with no correspondence to goods or labour, just numbers reproducing asexually). then everyone stopped believing the money was there… when the government starts makes money out of nothing (by just saying it’s there) how long til the government breaks?
edit – loyroy comment worth bumping up:
“But governments aren’t making money out of nothing, when they bail out banks they are taxing people (many of whom labour in the real economy) to pay for the errors of the all these fictitious markets. It’s the nationalisation of risk.”
this also worth flagging up – “The gross national debt now stands at more than $9.6 trillion, but that number could easily run over $11 trillion next year once all of the bailout’s borrowing costs are fully accounted for.” from. beware rev. moon.
