CEO’s of Modern Art

So the shiny-kitch-for-the-rich Jeff Koons show has led to surging membership at the Whitney museum! That is not a surprise knowing the Corporate Artworld model needs capitalist artists to perpetuate its economic hierarchy and raise its bottom line! How else are they going to pay for their new digs near the High Line? Koons and his incestuous ilk like Damien Hirst represent one of the most disturbing trends in the contemporary art market – appropriation of imagery and outsourcing of art production. This process leaves any ‘artist’ willing to dismiss these moral scruples solely responsible for personal promotion and exploitation of profits from their artworld conspirators. They are accurate in describing their art as ‘conceptual’ because that is virtually the only involvement they can claim with their own pieces. These artists are really only managing and manipulating labor, resources, and talent outside themselves – a mirror of the economic imperialism of Corporate Capitalism under globalization. Call them the ‘Multinational CEO’s of modern Art’! No wonder there is such cynicism in the artworld! I recently read a review of the Koons exhibition in the New York Review of Books where they noted how far the intent of dada ‘readymades’ are from Koons’ art souvenirs and how many in the artworld have been drinking the Koons Kool-Aid for too long. It is reassuring that there are still some sane critics in the artworld who have not been bought.  It may be jealousy but how can you take seriously all the Koons BS such as the statement that his use of reflective surfaces are a way for him to get the public into his art piece!? I guess a viewer’s gag reflex would, in Koonspeak, be an urge to bestow the art with a viewer’s most intimate emotions! Art discourse can be, like Corporate propaganda, such eloquent doublespeak! In fact the artworld, like current politics, is rapidly becoming a cult of personality and public manipulation out of Orwell’s 1984. The artworld in 2014 is being handled by the ‘Ministy of Truth’ and cultural significance is rectified in blackwhite.