this rules !!! especially loved the part about success stories. once institutions find some "break-through success" that they deem marketable, palatable enough to sell, and less "scary and weird" in a previously un-marketable scene, it's over; they latch on to it, try to make it The Image Of A Scene in popular consciousness, and dangle the possibility of their future patronage over everyone else try to keep them Producing Marketable Content
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Thanks Violet! I appreciate your entries a lot.
Yeah, the success thing… I’m currently reading Art after Money, Money after Art by Max Haiven so while writing this essay I was carrying with me the thought of the Art World (itself a branch of capital/neoliberalism) always seeking out the new and edgy ideas to colonise and absorb into itself. ‘Weird’ is the new frontier for them. It’s a fun book (if a bit heady) and you could replace ‘art’ with ‘games’ in it and everything would still ring true.
So yeah, it’s this book + my frustrations with some of the attitudes I’ve seen in my vicinity that made me channel the ungrateful dog in me. I’m glad it resonates.
oh, the book sounds fascinating, i'll have to look it up! the issue does seem to apply to so many scenes; that reminds me as well of fashion and the ways that even explicitly anticapitalist/anti fashion industry/underground fashion movements can get absorbed by institutions and eventually reproduced/mass produced in softened and less "challenging" forms. serves double purpose to earn the industry more money, and also as a bonus rob a form of potentially political creative expression of its meaning.