El Fabuloso Mundo Artificial

"This whole virtual technology media circus, this perpetual ‘reality show,’ has an ancestor: the readymade. Those who are plucked from their real lives to come and act out the psychodrama of their AIDS or their marital problems on TV have an ancestor in Duchamp’s bottle-rack which that artist similarly plucked from the real world to confer on it elsewhere — in a field we still agree to call art — an undefinable hyperreality.

Paradoxical acting-out, instantaneous short-circuiting. The bottle-rack, exscribed from its context, purpose and function, became more real than reality (hyperreal) and more art than art (transaesthetics of banality, of insignificance, of nullity, against which the pure and indifferent form of art is verified today). Any old object, individual or situation is launched by new museums where the aim is not now to (...) -figured in situ by aesthetic or cultural decree, cloned in our own image by High Definition and condemned, by that exact resemblance, to media stupefaction, just as the ready-made is condemned to aesthetic stupefaction. 

And just as Duchamp's acting-out opens on to the (generalized) zero degree of aesthetics, where any old item of rubbish can be taken as a work of art (which also means that any old work of art can be taken for rubbish), so this media acting-out opens on to a generalized virtuality which puts an end to the real by its promotion of every single instant.

(...) There is the same problem with the TV 'reality shows': the viewer has to be brought not in front of the screen (he has always been there, and that is indeed his alibi and refuge) but into the screen, taken to the other side of the information setup. He has to be made to carry out the same conversion as Duchamp did with his bottle—rack when he transferred it, just as it was, to the other side of art, creating, as he did so, a definitive ambiguity between art and reality. Art today is simply this paradoxical confusion of the two, and the aesthetic intoxication which ensues. Similarly, information is simply the paradoxical confusion of the event and the medium, and the political uncertainty which ensues. So, we have all become ready-mades."

(TOO COOL 3; Pata-No UN LTD)

 Iglesia del Surf del Cristo Risueño de la Costa LTD. MMXXII ©