TALK: IRMGARD EMMELHAINZ

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE AUTONOMY OF ART

Neoliberalism promotes that everyone can be a partner, owner and entrepreneur; at the same time, it celebrates creative visionaries, independent workers and individual freedom of expression. At the same time, it proclaims the autonomy of the economic, political and cultural spheres. In the era of democratic information societies, however, decisions are taken by a minority and public debt – the existential condition of neoliberal citizens-consumers – is impoverishing all. At a global scale, citizens are surveilled all the time: both in the public and private realism. In the 1980s, the punk movement declared “There is no future!” and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that there was no more society: only the individual. The process of the privatization of the common good began four decades ago, while the Welfare State began to be dismantled. While neoliberal policies exercise violence on bodies and forms of life, political forces have propelled a redistribution of wealth focused on the private sphere and cultural production (by outsourcing and to the detriment of health and education programs). Culture is considered to be the window of democracy, as well as an instrument for betterment, the reconstruction of the social tissue and a means to heal the wounds from violence.

Irmgard Emmelhainz will address the issue of the autonomy of art under neoliberalism taking into account Theodor Adorno's and Jean-Paul Sartre's 1962 discussion on the autonomy of politicized art under the light of Clement Greenberg's and Hal Foster's elucidations on the same subject, as well Frederic Jameson's diagnosis of "The Cultural Turn," bearing in mind how neoliberalism operates as a sensibility.

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent writer, scholar, and translator based in Mexico City. She obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto with a thesis on Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question (2009).

Further reading:
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-and-the-cultural-turn-farewell-to-committed-autonomous-art/

The talk is supported by The Danish Art Council and The Embassy of Mexico in Denmark.