Writing

The artist's output

Documents

Details

The artist’s output must fit the shape of the institution’s relations of distribution in order to allow the institution to celebrate and reproduce itself.

The institutional "gram" is the set of expectations an art-world places on in it's subjects when they participate in heritage-futures trading, in the search for having a "valid" experience. In response to art-expectations and often cultural and racial stereotypes, subjects reflect the expectations of a curatorial force in order to perhaps quite simply exist. This is often described as a destructive process, in which important cultural expressions are downgraded into references, or they quite simply cease to exist. Existing becomes consumed by an economic process which boosts certain cultural expressions over others, and cultural themes that cannot be easily distributed fall out of favour, or quite simply cease to exist.

This gram can also serve as a booster of ethnic identity, as it can revive cultural traditions that may have fallen out of favour under the vestiges of colonialism and imperialism. Because of the importance of cultural capital in many affinity groups, artists are placed in a dynamic where cultural "authenticity" becomes something very tangible and necessary to achieve economic success, or quite simply exist. This "reconstruction of identity" becomes important, because artists tend to act out cultural patterns and behaviours they believe would satisfy art-world distribution networks, co-producing their existence. The contemporary artist plays on stereotypes that Collectors have of their subjectivity, and seeks to perform them as best they can to trigger perception demand. The power that the "gram" has in supporting ethnic pride and identity can also be used to destroy ethnic pride and identity, in the cases where curatorial expectations do not align with the everyday realities of undistributed populations.