Revenge of the Spectacle: This Time It's Personal

November 21, 2017 Jason Netek

“No one today can reasonably doubt the existence or the power of the spectacle; on the contrary, one might doubt whether it is reasonable to add anything on a question which experience has already settled in such draconian fashion.” – Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1989

Within five years of writing these lines, Guy Debord – author, filmmaker, and leader of a coterie of radical intellectuals known as the Situationist International – despairing at the ever quickening advance of the society he opposed, brought his own life to an end. He had lived long enough to see the collapse of the bipolar world order of the Cold War and the Americanization of the world.

Red Wedge Panel 2: Interrogating Uneven and Combined

August 17, 2016 Alexander Billet, Trish Kahle, Jordy Cummings and Adam Turl

The Red Wedge "Interrogating Uneven and Combined Development in Aesthetics" panel at Historical Materialism Toronto 2016 (York University). Right to left: Alex Billet, Adam Turl, Trish Kahle and Jordy Cummings.

Recent years have seen an application of the Marxist concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) to the study of cultural and aesthetic production. With a few exceptions, however, this application has been limited to the medium of literature.

This panel interrogates the framework of UCD and aesthetics through questioning the nature of the relationship and expanding said framework into music and visual art. It also discusses the relationship between aesthetics and the geographic changes of neoliberalism.

Against the Weak Avant-Garde

April 5, 2016 Adam Turl

Robert Rauchenberg's White Paintings — Robert Rauchenberg's *White Paintings*

We have reached the Hegelian endgame; the fusion of art and philosophy. Not quite, as Arthur Danto notes, a negation of art by philosophy but the fusion of both. The art object has become, it is claimed, a philosophical argument in itself. But it is a pyrrhic victory – a Twilight Zone ending for art history, modernism and the avant-garde.

Anything can be made into art. But there is a small army of theorists dedicated to parsing out what is and isn’t art. Anyone can be an artist – if they aren’t too attached to the idea of eating dinner. Art and philosophy have fused but in the absence of the social revolution that was meant to accompany that fusion. The result is a philosophical-art object that is profoundly weak. If the present model of serious contemporary art is a weak avant-garde, the solution is a popular avant-garde: a rapprochement between artistic experimentation (as art) and mass emancipatory politics.

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