2017.03.17 科技初创企业已成为概念性艺术

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TECHNOLOGY
Tech Start-Ups Have Become Conceptual Art
An edible drone doesn’t need to feed the starving to do its job.

By Ian Bogost

Windhorse Aerospace
MARCH 17, 2017
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Let’s catalog a few important moments in the history of conceptual art:

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed and dated a porcelain urinal, installed it on a plinth, and entered it into the first exhibition for the Society of Independent Artists.

In 1961, Robert Rauchenberg submitted a telegram reading “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so” as his contribution to an exhibition of portraits hosted at Clert’s eponymous Paris gallery.

That same year, Piero Manzoni exhibited tin cans labeled “Artist’s Shit.” The cans purportedly contained the feces of the artist, but opening them to verify the claim would destroy the work.


In 2007, Damien Hirst commissioned a diamond-encrusted, platinum cast of a human skull. It cost £14 million to produce, and Hirst attempted to sell it for £50 million—mostly so that it would become the most valuable work sold by a living artist.

And in 2017, Nigel Gifford designed an edible, unmanned drone meant to deliver humanitarian aid to disaster zones.

Okay, I lied. The last one is a technology start-up. But it might as well be a work of conceptual art. In fact, it makes one wonder if there’s still any difference between the two.

* * *

Conceptualism has taken many forms since the early 20th century. At its heart, the name suggests that a concept or idea behind work of art eclipses or replaces that work’s aesthetic properties. Some conceptual works deemphasize form entirely. Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, for example, is a book with instructions on how to recast ordinary life as performance art. Others, like Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, lean heavily on the material object to produce effects beyond it. And others, like the pseudonymous graffiti-artist Banksy’s documentary film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, about a street artist who becomes a commercial sensation, deliberately refuse to reveal whether they are elaborate put-ons or earnest portrayals.

In each case, the circulation of the idea becomes as important—if not more so—than the nature of the work itself. And circulation implies markets. And markets mean money, and wealth—matters with which art has had a long and troubled relationship. By holding business at a distance in order to critique it, the arts may have accidentally ceded those critiques to commerce anyway.

Before art was culture it was ritual, and the ritual practice of art was tied to institutions—the church, in particular. Later, the Renaissance masters were bound to wealthy patrons. By the time the 20th-century avant-garde rose to prominence, the art world—all of the institutions and infrastructure for creating, exhibiting, selling, and consuming art—had established a predictable pattern of embrace and rejection of wealth. On the one hand, artists sought formal and political ends that questioned the supposed progress associated with industrial capitalism. But on the other hand, exhibition and collection of those works were reliant on the personal and philanthropic wealth of the very industrialists artists often questioned.

These are the Artist’s Shit of capitalism, daring someone to open them and look.
One solution some artists adopted: to use art to question the art world itself. Such is what Duchamp and Rauchenberg and Manzoni and Hirst all did, albeit obliquely. Others were more direct. Hans Haacke, for example, used artwork to expose the connections between the art and corporate worlds; his exhibitions looked more like investigative reports than installations.

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Despite attempts to hold capital at arms length, money always wins. Artists low and high, from Thomas Kinkade to Picasso, have made the commercialization of their person and their works a deliberate part of their craft.

By the 1990s, when Hirst rose to prominence, high-art creators began embracing entrepreneurship rather than lamenting it. Early in his career, Hirst collaborated with the former advertising executive and art collector Charles Saatchi, who funded The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a sculpture of a severed tiger shark in three vats of formaldehyde. That work eventually sold for $12 million. Hirst’s relationship with Saatchi was less like that of a Renaissance master to a patron, and more like that of a founder to a venture capitalist. The money and the art became deliberately inextricable, rather than accidentally so.

Banksy, for his part, has often mocked the wealthy buyers who shelled out six-figure sums for his stenciled art, and even for his screenprints. It’s a move that can’t fail, for the artist can always claim the moral high ground of supposed resistance while cashing the checks of complicity.

Hirst and Banksy have a point: Cashing in on art might have become a necessary feature of art. The problem with scoffing at money is that money drives so much of the world that art occupies and comment on. After the avant-garde, art largely became a practice of pushing the formal extremes of specific media. Abstract artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock pressed the formal space of canvas, pigment, and medium to its breaking point, well beyond representation. Duchamp and Manzoni did the same with sculpture. And yet, artists have resisted manipulating capitalism directly, in the way that Hirst does. In retrospect, that might have been a tactical error.

* * *

If markets themselves have become the predominant form of everyday life, then it stands to reason that artists should make use of those materials as the formal basis of their works. The implications from this are disturbing. Taken to an extreme, the most formally interesting contemporary conceptual art sits behind Bloomberg terminals instead of plexiglass vitrines. Just think of the collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that helped catalyze the foundation of the 2008 global financial crisis. These are the Artist’s Shit of capitalism, daring someone to open them and look. The result, catastrophic though it was, was formally remarkable as a work made of securities speculation, especially for those who ultimately profited from collapsing the world economy. What true artist wouldn’t dream of such a result?

Even so, finance is too abstract, too extreme, and too poorly aestheticized to operate as human culture. But Silicon Valley start-ups offer just the right blend of boundary-pushing, human intrigue, ordinary life, and perverse financialization to become the heirs to the avant-garde.

If the point of conceptual art is to advance concepts, then the tech sector is winning at the art game.
Take Nigel Gifford’s drone start-up, Windhorse Aerospace, which makes the edible humanitarian relief drone. In the event of disasters and conflict, the start-up reasons, getting food and shelter to victims is difficult due to lost infrastructure. The drone, known as Pouncer, would be loaded with food and autonomously flown into affected areas. Whether in hope or naivety, Windhorse claims that Pouncer will “avoid all infrastructure problems, corruption or hostile groups,” although one might wonder why bright green airplanes might avert the notice of the corrupt and the hostile.


The product epitomizes the conceit of contemporary Silicon Valley. It adopts and commercializes a familiar technology for social and political benefit, but in such a simplistic way that it’s impossible to tell if the solution is proposed in earnest or in parody. Pouncer can be seen either as a legitimate, if unexpected, way to solve a difficult problem, or as the perfect example of the technology industry’s inability to take seriously the problems it claims to solve. How to feed the hungry after civil unrest or natural disaster? Fly in edible drones from the comfort of you co-working space. Problem solved!

It’s not Gifford’s first trip up where the air gets light, either. His last company, Ascenta, was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $20 million. Once under Facebook’s wing, Gifford and his team built Aquila, the drone meant to deliver internet connectivity to all people around the globe. Here too, an idea—global connectivity as a human right and a human good—mates to both formal boundary-pushing and commercial profit-seeking. By comparison to Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to extract data (and thereby latent market value) from every human being on earth, it’s hard to be impressed at a wealthy British artist trying to flip a diamond-encrusted skull at 300 percent profit.

Conceptualism has one gimmick—that the idea behind the work has more value than the work itself. As it happens, that’s not a bad definition of securitization, the process of transforming illiquid assets into financial instruments. Whether Windhorse’s edible drones really work, or whether they could effectively triage humanitarian crises is far less important in the short term than the apparent value of the concept or the technology. If humanitarian aid doesn’t work out, the company can always “pivot” into another use, to use that favorite term of start-ups. What a company does is ultimately unimportant; what matters is the materials with which it does things, and the intensity with which it pitches those uses as revolutionary.

Today, everyone transforms toilets into artworks on Instagram.
This routine has become so common that it’s become hard to get through the day without being subjected to technological conceptualism. On Facebook, an advertisement for a Kickstarter-funded “smart parka” that hopes to “re-invent winter coats” and thereby to “hack winter.” A service called Happify makes the foreboding promise, “Happiness. It’s winnable.” Daphne Koller, the co-founder of the online-learning start-up that promised to reinvent education in the developing world like Windhorse hopes to do with the airdrop, quits to join Google’s anti-aging group Calico. Perhaps she concluded that invincibility would be a more viable business prospect than education.


Me-too tech gizmos and start-ups have less of an edge than conceptual art ever did. Hirst’s work, including the diamond skull and the taxidermied shark, are memento mori—symbols of human frailty and mortality. Even Rauchenberg’s telegram says something about the arbitrariness of form and the accidents of convention. By contrast, when technology pushes boundaries, it does so largely rhetorically—by laying claim to innovation and disruption rather than embodying it. But in so doing, it has transformed technological innovation into the ultimate idea worthy of pursuit. And if the point of conceptual art is to advance concepts, then the tech sector is winning at the art game.

* * *

Today, the arts in America are at risk. President Donald Trump’s new federal budget proposes eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (along with the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). The NEA is especially cheap, making its proposed elimination symbolic more than fiscal. It’s a dream some Republicans have had for decades, thanks in part to the perception that NEA-funded programs are extravagances that serve liberalism.

The potential gutting of the NEA is worthy of concern and lamentation. But equally important, and no less disturbing, is the fact that the role of art, in part, had already shifted from the art world to the business world anyway. In particular, the formal boundary-pushing central to experimental and conceptual artists might have been superseded by the conceptual efforts of entrepreneurship. The much better-funded efforts, at that. As ever, money is the problem for art, rather than a problem within it.


Elsewhere in the art world, successful works have become more imbricated with their financial conditions. Earlier this year, Banksy opened the Walled Off Hotel, an “art hotel” installation in Bethlehem. It’s an idea that demands reassurance; the first entry on the project’s FAQ asks, “Is this a joke?” (“Nope—it's a genuine art hotel,” the page answers.) Despite the possible moral odiousness of Palestinian-occupation tourism, local critics have billed it as a powerful anti-colonialist lampoon. A high-art theme park.

It’s an imperfect solution. But what is the alternative? In the tech industry, the wealthy don’t tend to become arts collectors or philanthropists. Unlike Charles Saatchi, they don’t take on young artists as patrons, even if just to fuel their own egos. Instead they start more companies, or fund venture firms, or launch quasi non-profits. Meanwhile, traditional arts education and funding has become increasingly coupled to technology anyway, partly out of desperation. STEAM adds “art” to STEM’s science, technology, engineering, and math, reframing art as a synonym for creativity and innovation—the conceptual fuel that technology already advances as its own end anyway.

Looking at Duchamp’s urinal and Rauchenberg’s telegram, the contemporary viewer would be forgiven for seeing them as banal. Today, everyone transforms toilets into artworks on Instagram. Everyone makes quips on Twitter that seem less clever as time passes. What remains are already-wealthy artists funding projects just barely more interesting than the products funded by other, already-wealthy entrepreneurs.


From that vantage point, the conceptual art avant-garde becomes a mere dead branch on the evolutionary tree that leads to technological entrepreneurship. Everyone knows that ideas are cheap. But ideas that get executed—those are expensive. Even if that implementation adds precious little to the idea beyond making it material. The concept, it turns out, was never enough. It always needed implementation—and the money to do so.

Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Director of the Program in Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His latest book is Play Anything.



科技
科技初创企业已成为概念性艺术
一架可食用的无人机不需要为饥饿的人提供食物来完成它的工作。

作者：伊恩-博格斯特

风马航空
2017年3月17日
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让我们对概念艺术史上的几个重要时刻进行分类。

1917年，马塞尔-杜尚在一个瓷制小便池上签名并注明日期，将其安装在一个基座上，并参加了独立艺术家协会的第一次展览。

1961年，Robert Rauchenberg提交了一份电报，上面写着 "如果我说这是Iris Clert的肖像"，作为他对Clert的同名巴黎画廊举办的肖像展览的贡献。

同年，皮耶罗-曼佐尼展出了标有 "艺术家的粪便 "的铁罐。据称，这些罐子里装的是艺术家的粪便，但打开罐子来验证这一说法会破坏作品。


2007年，达米安-赫斯特委托制作一个镶有钻石的铂金人头骨铸件。它的制作成本为1400万英镑，赫斯特试图以5000万英镑的价格出售它，这主要是为了让它成为在世艺术家出售的最有价值的作品。

而在2017年，奈杰尔-吉福德设计了一种可食用的无人驾驶飞机，旨在向灾区提供人道主义援助。

好吧，我撒谎了。最后一个是一个技术创业公司。但它还不如说是一件概念性艺术作品。事实上，它让人怀疑这两者之间是否还有什么区别。

* * *

自20世纪初以来，概念主义采取了许多形式。就其核心而言，这个名字表明，艺术作品背后的概念或想法使该作品的美学属性黯然失色或被取代。一些概念性作品完全不强调形式。例如，小野洋子的《葡萄柚》是一本关于如何将普通生活重塑为行为艺术的书。其他作品，如赫斯特的镶钻头骨，严重依赖物质对象来产生超越它的效果。而另一些作品，如假名涂鸦艺术家班克斯的纪录片《从礼品店出来》，讲述了一位街头艺术家成为商业轰动人物的故事，故意拒绝透露它们是精心的装点还是认真的描绘。

在每一种情况下，思想的流通与作品本身的性质一样重要--如果不是更重要的话。而流通意味着市场。而市场意味着金钱和财富--艺术与之有着长期而麻烦的关系。通过与商业保持距离以批判它，艺术可能已经意外地将这些批判让给了商业。

在艺术成为文化之前，它是一种仪式，而艺术的仪式实践是与机构--特别是教会--联系在一起的。后来，文艺复兴时期的大师们与富有的赞助人联系在一起。到了20世纪前卫艺术崛起的时候，艺术界--所有创造、展示、销售和消费艺术的机构和基础设施--已经建立了一个可预测的拥抱和拒绝财富的模式。一方面，艺术家们寻求形式和政治目的，质疑与工业资本主义相关的所谓进步。但另一方面，这些作品的展览和收藏又依赖于艺术家经常质疑的工业家的个人和慈善财富。

这些是资本主义的艺术家的粪便，让人不敢打开看。
一些艺术家采取了一个解决方案：用艺术来质疑艺术世界本身。这就是杜尚、劳森伯格、曼佐尼和赫斯特所做的，尽管是间接的。其他人则更直接。例如，汉斯-哈克（Hans Haacke）用艺术作品来揭露艺术界和企业界之间的联系；他的展览看起来更像是调查报告，而不是装置。

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尽管试图与资本保持距离，但金钱总是赢家。从托马斯-金凯德（Thomas Kinkade）到毕加索（Picasso），无论地位高低的艺术家，都把他们的个人和作品的商业化作为他们艺术创作的一部分。

到20世纪90年代，当赫斯特崭露头角时，高级艺术创作者开始拥抱企业家精神，而不是哀叹它。在他职业生涯的早期，赫斯特与前广告主管和艺术收藏家查尔斯-萨奇（Charles Saatchi）合作，后者资助了《活着的人心目中死亡的物理不可能性》，一个在三大桶甲醛中被切断的虎鲨雕塑。那件作品最终以1200万美元成交。赫斯特与萨奇的关系不像是文艺复兴时期的大师与赞助人的关系，而更像是一个创始人与风险投资家的关系。金钱和艺术成了故意不可分割的关系，而不是偶然的。

就班克斯而言，他经常嘲笑那些为他的钢印艺术，甚至为他的丝网印刷掏出六位数金额的富有的买家。这是一个不可能失败的举动，因为艺术家总是可以在兑现同谋支票的同时，声称自己是所谓的抵抗的道德高地。

赫斯特和班克斯有一个观点。从艺术中套现可能已经成为艺术的一个必要特征。对金钱嗤之以鼻的问题是，金钱推动了艺术所占据和评论的世界的大部分。在前卫艺术之后，艺术在很大程度上成为一种推动特定媒体的形式极端化的做法。像马克-罗斯科和杰克逊-波洛克这样的抽象艺术家将画布、颜料和媒介的形式空间压到了极限，远远超出了表现力。杜尚和曼佐尼在雕塑方面也是如此。然而，艺术家们一直抵制直接操纵资本主义，就像赫斯特那样。现在回想起来，这可能是一个战术上的错误。

* * *

如果市场本身已经成为日常生活的主要形式，那么艺术家理应利用这些材料作为他们作品的形式基础。这其中的含义是令人不安的。走到一个极端，形式上最有趣的当代概念艺术就坐在彭博社的终端后面，而不是有机玻璃的玻璃橱窗。想想那些帮助催化了2008年全球金融危机的抵押债务和信用违约掉期就知道了。这些都是资本主义的 "艺术家的屎"，让人不敢打开看。其结果，尽管是灾难性的，但作为证券投机的作品，尤其是对那些最终从世界经济崩溃中获利的人来说，在形式上是很了不起的。哪个真正的艺术家不会梦想这样的结果？

即便如此，金融也太抽象、太极端，而且审美性太差，无法作为人类文化运作。但硅谷的初创公司恰好提供了边界推进、人类阴谋、普通生活和反常的金融化的混合体，成为前卫艺术的继承者。

如果概念艺术的重点是推进概念，那么科技部门在艺术游戏中正在获胜。
以Nigel Gifford的无人机创业公司Windhorse Aerospace为例，该公司生产可食用的人道主义救援无人机。该公司的理由是，在发生灾难和冲突时，由于失去了基础设施，很难向受害者提供食物和住所。这种被称为Pouncer的无人机将装载食物，并自主飞往受灾地区。不管是出于希望还是天真，Windhorse声称Pouncer将 "避开所有的基础设施问题、腐败或敌对团体"，尽管人们可能想知道为什么亮绿色的飞机会避开腐败和敌对团体的注意。


该产品是当代硅谷的自负的缩影。它采用了一种熟悉的技术并将其商业化，以获得社会和政治利益，但采用的方式非常简单，以至于无法分辨该解决方案是认真提出的还是模仿的。Pouncer既可以被看作是解决一个困难问题的合法方式，即使是出乎意料的方式，也可以被看作是技术行业无法认真对待其声称要解决的问题的完美例子。如何在内乱或自然灾害发生后为饥饿的人提供食物？从你的联合办公空间舒适地飞来可食用的无人机。问题解决了!

这也不是吉福德第一次到空气变轻的地方去。他的上一家公司Ascenta在2014年被Facebook以2000万美元收购。一旦在Facebook的羽翼下，吉福德和他的团队建立了Aquila，这架无人机旨在为全球所有的人提供互联网连接。在这里，一个想法--全球连通性是一项人权和人类福祉--与正式的边界推进和商业利润追求相匹配。与马克-扎克伯格从地球上每个人身上提取数据（以及潜在的市场价值）的愿望相比，很难对一个富有的英国艺术家试图以300%的利润翻转一个镶有钻石的头骨留下印象。

观念主义有一个噱头--作品背后的想法比作品本身更有价值。恰好，这也是证券化的一个不错的定义，即把非流动性资产转化为金融工具的过程。Windhorse的可食用无人机是否真的有效，或者它们是否可以有效地分流人道主义危机，在短期内远不如概念或技术的表面价值重要。如果人道主义援助不成功，该公司总是可以 "转向 "另一个用途，用创业公司最喜欢的那个词来形容。一家公司做什么最终并不重要；重要的是它做事情的材料，以及它把这些用途作为革命性的东西来推销的力度。

今天，每个人都在Instagram上把厕所变成了艺术品。
这种例行公事已经变得如此普遍，以至于如果不受制于技术概念主义，就很难度过这一天。在Facebook上，一个由Kickstarter资助的 "智能大衣 "的广告，希望 "重新发明冬季大衣"，从而 "黑掉冬天"。一项名为Happify的服务做出了不祥的承诺："幸福。它是可以赢的。" 达芙妮-科勒（Daphne Koller）是在线学习初创公司的联合创始人，该公司承诺在发展中国家重塑教育，就像Windhorse希望用空投做的那样，她辞职后加入了谷歌的抗衰老组织Calico。也许她的结论是，无敌将是一个比教育更可行的商业前景。


与概念艺术相比，Me-too科技小玩意和新创公司的优势更小。赫斯特的作品，包括钻石头骨和标本鲨鱼，是人类脆弱和死亡的象征。甚至劳森伯格的电报也说了一些关于形式的任意性和惯例的意外。相比之下，当技术推动边界时，它在很大程度上是以修辞方式进行的--声称是创新和破坏，而不是体现它。但在这样做的时候，它已经把技术创新转化为值得追求的终极理念。如果概念艺术的重点是推进概念，那么科技部门在艺术游戏中获胜。

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今天，美国的艺术正处于危险之中。唐纳德-特朗普总统的新联邦预算提议取消国家艺术基金会（以及国家人文基金会和公共广播公司）。国家艺术基金特别便宜，使其拟议的取消具有象征意义，而不是财政意义。这是一些共和党人几十年来的一个梦想，部分原因是人们认为国家艺术局资助的项目是为自由主义服务的奢侈行为。

对NEA的潜在砍伐值得关注和悲叹。但同样重要的是，同样令人不安的是，艺术的作用，在某种程度上，已经从艺术世界转移到了商业世界。特别是，对实验和概念艺术家来说，正式的边界推动可能已经被企业家的概念性努力所取代了。更多的是资金方面的努力。和以往一样，钱是艺术的问题，而不是艺术内部的问题。


在艺术界的其他地方，成功的作品已经变得与他们的财务状况更加密切相关。今年早些时候，班克斯在伯利恒开设了 "围墙酒店"，一个 "艺术酒店 "装置。这是一个需要保证的想法；该项目常见问题的第一个条目问道："这是一个笑话吗？"（"不，这是一个真正的艺术酒店，"该页面回答道。）尽管巴勒斯坦占领区的旅游可能在道德上是可憎的，但当地的评论家称它是一个强大的反殖民主义笑话。一个高级艺术主题公园。

这是一个不完美的解决方案。但替代方案是什么呢？在科技行业，富人并不倾向于成为艺术收藏家或慈善家。与查尔斯-萨奇（Charles Saatchi）不同，他们不会把年轻艺术家作为赞助人，即使只是为了刺激他们自己的自尊心。相反，他们创办更多的公司，或资助风险公司，或启动准非营利组织。同时，传统的艺术教育和资金已经越来越多地与技术结合在一起，部分是出于无奈。STEAM将 "艺术 "添加到STEM的科学、技术、工程和数学中，将艺术重塑为创造力和创新的代名词--无论如何，技术已经作为其自身的目的而推进的概念性燃料。

看着杜尚的小便池和劳森伯格的电报，当代观众会被原谅，认为它们很平庸。今天，每个人都在Instagram上把厕所变成了艺术品。每个人都在Twitter上进行调侃，但随着时间的推移，这些调侃显得不那么聪明。剩下的是已经很富有的艺术家资助的项目，仅仅比其他已经很富有的企业家资助的产品更有趣而已。


从这个角度看，概念艺术的前卫派只是通往技术创业的进化树上的一个死枝。每个人都知道，想法很便宜。但被执行的想法是昂贵的。即使这种执行除了使想法成为现实之外，几乎没有增加什么内容。事实证明，概念永远是不够的。它总是需要实施，而且需要钱来实施。

Ian Bogost是《大西洋》杂志的特约撰稿人，也是圣路易斯华盛顿大学电影和媒体研究项目的主任。他的最新著作是《Play Anything》。