Issue #48: American Finance, the Global Market for Art, and the Need for Speed

This issue is structured around contemporary political and aesthetic debates focused on three books: The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From JP Morgan to BlackRock by Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno; The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy by Larissa Buchholz; and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Included here are a range of responses to these books in the hope of generating more discussion around finance capital, the global art world, and the accelerated rate of consumption under capital. Also featured is an essay by novelist Sunjeev Sahota on class politics and publishing.

Inside the issue

The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?

Jensen Suther December 12, 2024

At a crucial juncture in her reconstruction of Marx’s account, Kornbluh claims that “labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value.” But this neglects Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor, or labor as productive of value and labor as productive of objects of use. Contrary to Kornbluh, value is not “generated” by exchange but rather by the expenditure of labor time and realized through exchange. So long as value—labor time—is the measure of social wealth, workers must expend abstract labor in exchange for a wage, while the capitalist appropriates the products the worker has valorized. This implies that the form of distribution—the propertylessness of the worker—is grounded in the form of production itself.

The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock

Respondents December 12, 2024

The central argument we make in the book, contrary to the received wisdom on the left, is that the rise of capitalist finance in the current period cannot be understood as a cause or symptom of the decline of the “real” industrial economy. Nor can it be considered as “separate” from production. Rather, finance is and has been utterly integral to the dynamism, flexibility, and strength of capital. Moreover, we show that it is precisely as a result of the role of finance that capitalist development has not led to increasing monopolistic stagnation but has increased the competitiveness of capital by facilitating its growing mobility across space and among economic sectors. Capitalist financialization has thus served to intensify the competitive discipline on all investments to maximize monetary returns.

The Painter: 5 Prose Poems in Memory of Joseph Marioni

Michael Fried December 23, 2024

Joseph Marioni emails to say that he has finally resolved his large green painting. The last Archetype has fallen — not fallen, exactly, rather it has yielded to The Painter’s uncompromising efforts.

The Inauthenticity of our Class Discourse: or, Publishing Respects your Foodbank Usage

Sunjeev Sahota December 15, 2024

The issue, therefore, is not that we need to stop representation from benefiting elite minorities—that’s just representation in its most indefensible form—but that we need to stop believing that representation, or, more broadly conceived, anti-discrimination, should be our foremost social justice commitment. Without a prior grounding in a politics of economic equality, all anti-discrimination boils down to is the neoliberal promise that people should have an equal opportunity to escape poverty; rather than trying to get rid of it.

The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy

Respondents December 12, 2024

It is assumed that “thinking globally” is a moral imperative within the humanities. Is it? Among other things, it presumes a neutral space from which to expand one’s geographic purview, as though curators and scholars could stand outside the global game of profit and recognition. In this issue of The Tank, art historians and critics respond to sociologist Larissa Buchholz’s analysis of the global contemporary art field. Do globalizing initiatives really serve artists outside the Global North? Or do they refract neoliberal logics of concentrating capital and expanding markets? Has the global turn transformed our evaluative norms? Or has the very concept of “the global” become just another currency for meting out prestige?