Stefan Heidenreich

panel discussion at the Art Brussels. Sunday 27th of April, 2-3:30h.
with Franco Berardi, Melanie Gilligan, Warren Neidich, and John Roberts.

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The effects of networked modes of production become more and more apparent also in the art-world. Value corresponds to connectedness. Relevance replaces meaning. Memory no longer operates under the time-frame of history but within a continuously accessible contemporary archive. Some doubt is cast on the role of the object as the dominant output of industrial production. With overproduction looming, goods were turned into symbolic carriers of distinctions. Now, they are being wrapped into layers of connections.
These transitions in the wider economy affect the art-world at large. The modernist construction of history gave way decades ago in favor of a cult of the contemporary. Now, the archive is getting reorganized again along time-independent attractors of attention. Art critique lost its power to an affirmative mode of networking that kept manifold modes of inclusion and exclusion in power. Art-objects are turned into knots within a network of references and intellectual affiliations.