<nettime> So what's the use of art, theory, activism?

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Anyone involved in the headliners of this post - or in teaching, free
software, and dozens of other idealistic pursuits - can well ask themselves
the question. What's the use, if the world is going to climate-change hell,
tech has poisoned people's brains and hearts, and your local fascist party
is about to get elected, or has just taken power?

I am in Stuttgart right now to install an art show, and while exiting a
restaurant I leaned over for a closer look at the Trump stickers plastered
on the computer of the guy seating customers. "Oh, it's just for fun," he
said to me. This is the beauty of the world that social media has made.

When Millei was elected in Argentina, people on the left were struck
speechless for months. With my collaborators at Casa Rio, we were involved
in a complex project trying to sketch out the rising influence of China on
the country's political ecology. But the public sphere in which such a
project could be meaningful had just collapsed into savage rhetoric
underwritten by a clear intent to use violence for a libertarian
transformation of the social contract. At one point we all basically had to
admit our despair. We resolved to go back to the basics, to the things we
believe in so deeply that we can't abandon them.

Now in the USA we are again struck speechless, for the second time. The
difference is, this time we on the progressive left have been betrayed by
those who claimed to represent us. Neoliberalism gradually made the culture
that we produce into a mask over a corrupt political system. Then on
October 7 the mask fell. We saw that the center-left elites, the masters of
cognitive creativity, were imperialists ready to kill for the defense of
global capitalism. Their first concern at home was to fire the radical
professors and beat back the student protests with the truncheons of the
police. When you have to fear your supposed friends, what to expect from
your sworn enemies?

I don't have the answers. It's why I don't post so much anymore. The themes
that animated this list over some thirty years are all in tatters. The
possibility of a more open and egalitarian world in which we all believed,
in one way or another, has been smashed by gigantic wrecking balls. Anyone
who looks back, and does not see the mistakes they themselves made on the
path to this disaster, is not really looking at all, in my humble opinion.

Yet I still hold to my deepest beliefs. And I am now an elder, who must
turn experience - even the experience of failures - into something valuable
for present and coming generations. Resistance happens in the streets, but
not only. It happens in the way that you live, the way that you change your
life without abandoning your past.

I write today because someone wrote to me offlist. I no longer say a word
about what I am doing, I can't promote myself, I'm not on social media, but
I invite you all to the Kunstlerhaus in Stuttgart, and more substantially,
to Watershed Art & Ecology in Chicago where I live. I invite you to
correspond, to think and feel together, to carry on into the future.

warmly, Brian

https://kuenstlerhaus.de
https//watershed-art.org
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