Sonic Acts 2019: Gregory Sholette – Can an Anti-Capitalist Avant-Garde Art Survive in a World of... - a podcast by Sonic Acts

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER
Gregory Sholette – Can an Anti-Capitalist Avant-Garde Art Survive in a World of Lolcats, Doomsday Preppers and Xenophobic Frog Memes? Do We Have a Choice?
23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

With an introduction by Ash Sarkar.

As artistic activism becomes a signature attribute of contemporary high culture, a wave of museum boycotts, protests, occupations and labour unrest marks our current decade. Meanwhile, much of the post-2008, post-Occupy art generation abhors the multi-billion-euro capitalist art market, even as the very term art is radically shifting, twisting, inverting, if not undergoing an outright self-expulsion from itself as it moves from its familiar white cube dwelling places to occupy the public sphere at an ever-accelerating tempo. But as art joins the everyday social world, its status as a privileged and critical realm that is set apart from the ubiquitous materialistic pursuits of a consumer society is likewise receding from view, and in truth, most high cultural practitioners have yet to really face this new, ‘bare’ art world and what it represents. Nevertheless, as art sheds its centuries-old ideological privilege of autonomy, it is gaining a front-row seat in the contentious struggle to rethink society, as well as the expressive, imaginative and artistic value is generated, for whom, why and to what ends. Still, the question lingers, how will art, especially activist and anti-capitalist art, remain critically radical once fully submerged in a world of lolcats, doomsday preppers and xenophobic frog memes?

Gregory Sholette is an artist, activist and writer. He was a founding member of several collectives such as Political Art Documentation and Distribution, REPOhistory and Gulf Labor. In his artistic work and seven books – including Art as Social Action (with Chloë Bass, 2018), Delirium and Resistance (2017), Dark Matter (2011), It’s The Political Economy, Stupid (with Oliver Ressler, 2012) – Sholette reflects upon decades of activist art that, for its ephemerality, politics and market resistance, might otherwise remain invisible. Sholette holds a PhD in History and Memory Studies from the University of Amsterdam (2017). He teaches Studio Art and co-directs the Social Practice Queens MFA program at Queens College, CUNY. He is an associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

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