Money, investment and the Curatorial nexus: Julie Mehretu

The nexus between money (those bubbles that fly off the froth of industrial cream ) and Curators is also clear. The case of artist Julie Mehretu embodies the nexus.

The dedicated 'Curator' School is now in full international function. The function is- to add stability to the artistic bubbles that rose to the top of the bucket since WWII, and to re-inforce the monetary value of those experiments carried forth by the usual set of isolated drunks and misfits that artists generally comprise, such that the patrons, who are the bubbles of industrial cream, can rest assured as to their investments.

The charade is near perfect- the art is dignified with relevance, the society of extreme cream can feel that their wealth is providing dribbets of goodness to the hoi polloi, the bureaucrats allocating state funding can justify their existence and their pensions, and those artists who are promoted are as dignified as these others: do not rock the boat, nor bite the hand that feeds you.

The underground is invisible artistically because the infection of drunk-like aesthetics has infected right down to the bottom of the bucket, and the underground lacks all resources of self-respect to withstand the entirely false structure weighing upon it.

The Curators are the Yes-Men of the powers funding the structure, and the structure above all must re-inforce ittself. The Museums of Modern Art are so infected that, since their entire holdings are either obtained from the Bubble Industrialists or subsidized by them, they cannot exhale for fear of aesthetic collapse.

Meanwhile the last paroxysms of International Capital, blind to the consequences of its rapine strategies, happily congregate to sup from the dregs of the aesthetic bucket, drinking as if this last findable drug could staunch their fears for the future. The aesthetically and humanly blind cogs of entirely inhuman industrial processi, those basement slaves of the super-bubbles, now join with their masters, in a repetition of Wall Street prior to the Great Crash- seeing art as their salvation. They know the rumours muttered in their power-basements, where the true mathematicians see the sums that do not add up or signify continuity- even before ecological factor enters their calculus, and run as if in panic , towards 'Art'.

The re-inforcement this new investment gives to the early bubble-cream investors in the great anti-aesthetic is welcome, and is channeled by the dealers, who as with the bubble-slave hedge-funders encourage and patronize the great concourse of 'Curators'. One doesn't need to say much about art dealers, except remember the reply of the Old Duke of so-and-so, who, when his daughter said that she planned to marry one- replied- 'My dear- I'd sooner that you walked the streets as a lady of the night'.

Of course the Curators should like to feel better about themselves than this, too. Doubtless they get sucked in, to the Bard College type, without knowing that they are to become but pawns to monsters, and doubtless they can sleep well in their beds feeling that their levels of aesthetic serve to ameliorate humanity's lot. However, they sleep in beds constructed upon the ashes of hope, and they promote as flags and beacons those whose aesthetic was snuffed out at weaning, by the cynicism and failure of Art Schools.

The cynicism is completed, the failure of society - in entirely separated politico-military fields, that is the ideological attachments to Empire that fed WWI and the completely avoidable descent into WWII disaster, was reflected by the Artists in their modernist practises. Their human reactions though are un curated, and only their processi of working are taken as their message, rather than their screams towards humanity. The processi alone, like as so many punks who have always to be bought off such that they shut-up, alone survived in the Curated Museum 'aspic'. The reasons for their distraught processi are forgotten and morally ignored, as the behemoths of evolving industrial-Empire replaced those earlier in existence.

The circle of frustration is felt but little in the ivory halls of cocktail exhibitions, where the coquetry of 19th century salons is replaced by the poseurdom of the 21st. The most culpable though, are the Curators, for they are the ones with the supposed rigour to think. These evidently are either blinded by their wishful impetii, persuaded that we advance not towards doom but to a shiny new world of digital expression or abounding inspiration, or else are- shame to say, walking in fear for their own slight ascension above the crushed and abject herd beneath them. Rather than risk their hard-earned (and costly) careers, they will brook no danger, but turn back towards the bucket where the monsters sup, and, holding their preciously educated noses, sup alongside.

Read it all, and weep ( or leap to invest in your own bucket) - http://www.collectorcircle.com/html/shecantbebought.html