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Vampire Castle Missive #1 - Anish Kapoor Bites the Hand That Feeds

                It seem that with the death of Michael Brooks that the uphill battle against the denizens of the mythic VampireCastle, a general term for what constitutes the various negative aspects of the modern liberal left from call out and cancel culture to HR ID politics and Karening, coined by the late Mark Fisher, has suffered another setback. Brooks had a lot to say about the modern leftist obsession with “pseudo-wokeness” and was generally seen arguing against it on his and other podcasts. While I intend to wrestle and engage with Michael Brooks’ ideas later, it felt necessary to bring his position into what I will argue next.

                In a very general sense, it seems as though the art world is yet again late to the game as to what is actually happening on the left and engaged in a fight against itself and using faulty pop theory and misplaced logic to propagate its insane moralizing tactics. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the artworld and its institutions have shed countless thousands of jobs, mostly in the lowest paid strata of the employed, amounting to a staggering 50% unemployment rate. The job cuts affected black and latino communities, women and LGBTQ, along with your standard issue straight white folks. As if by magic, months of union and community organizing simply vanished or were utterly destroyed, some say by the coronavirus, but truth be told, by various ruling class-aligned opportunists within the institutions. Various and ongoing picket lines and protests by laid-off and fired art workers have gone mostly unnoticed by the press and media and ignored by the moneyed classes and many many artists who are inextricably linked to the IV flows of cash from the upper echelons of power. This could in some part be due to the fact that many museum directors for example, fear that there is a significant risk that a third of all institutions will permanently shutter their doors due to the pandemic. But many institutions are simply sitting on millions of endowment dollars, gifts and PPPloans that are not filtering down to the poor. So while the art world’s 1 percenters are engaging in a campaign of virtue signaling and an abstract nebulous condemnation of racism, they are quashing the livelihoods of thousands of art workers across the US.

                But fear not, we have Anish Kapoor, the 1 percenters’ favorite 1 percenter artist, heroically swooping in to take center-center stage in the fight for, I guess, equality. Is Kapoor talking about the thousands of jobs lost, most likely permanently or indefinitely, futures squandered and trampled on by capricious elites? That would be far too simple and obvious. Kapoor takes the moral high ground and does what every denizen of the Vampire Castle does best, a wholesale abstract condemnation, in his words, of ‘tokenism’ in art collecting by art institutions. Kapoor seems to be more angered that it wasn’t he that got a whole room exhibition at MoMA but the ‘male and white’ Richard Serra rather than “the room of artists from here, there and everywhere,” somehow managing to both contradict himself and make himself the star in a show in which he did not participate. Megalomania and narcissism on full display. Designating someone as 'male and white,' is a charge more powerful than 'elite' or 'rich.' Serra and Kapoor occupy the same space within the blue chip artist hierarchy, but Kapoor is careful in not committing himself to taking aim and shooting into his own class ranks. It is a line of argumentation that looks more like petty squabbling over what kind of privilege is the ‘correct’ kind of privilege and Kapoor’s seems to be the art world’s default position in many respects. MoMA’s attempt at damage control, like those of SFMoMA’s, only highlights the art world’s inability to come to terms with its own systemic hierarchical structures. Replacing one type of elites with another based on identitarian politics does nothing to solve the problems facing the countless faceless artists and art workers living on the edges of society, grossly underpaid, and unappreciated. Kapoor’s feeble attempt at virtue signaling his way to the top of the moralizing elite of the Vampire Castle underscores how out of touch artists like he truly are in respect to the art world that consumes his work and to the real world where art or personality do not take center stage.

                The popularity of The Michael Brooks Show pointed toward a new phase in international left politics, freed from the balkanized identitarian self-obsessed Twitter leftists, who continue to squabble over who is able to better prostrate themselves in a performative ritual self-abuse on social media. Brooks was correct in critiquing this form of elitism and instead focused on bringing to his show as many voices as possible, “from Cornell West to Stavvy from Cum Town.” All of this is still somehow strangely absent in the halls of the neo-liberal art world where the fight against inequality, whether racial, socio-economic, sexual or gender or age-based, boils down to releasing patronizing press releases and sloganisms and playing the game of optical ally-ships, testing the lows of ‘regular’ workers’ dignity through not-so-subtle suggestions for each and every one of them to check on their privilege and probe the depths of their ‘anti-blackness’ personally, as if being denied a living wage or being out of work somehow constitutes a special form of white supremacy. This is all clearly a tactic to deflect attention and criticism of the art world’s elites’ ties to the financial sector, a beneficiary of the fed’s fiscal policy. Jeff Koons LLC received between $1-$2 million in PPP loans, and now I hear he may be going bankrupt. Moralizing and condemning are simple and effective means to keep the lower classes down and the corporate capitalist structure, responsible for this and previous economic crises, intact. Mark Fisher was deeply aware of this power play when he wrote Exiting the Vampire’s Castle and later, depressed and disillusioned, took his own life. Michael Brooks on the other hand, had a promising career ahead of him, a vast audience and no signs of a troubling medical condition of which he unexpectedly died earlier this week.  Both sought to advance leftist politics beyond identity and both in a way succeeded through their own personal death.

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