On Saturday I went to Sluice, an anti-Freeze, art fair. Not my thing really. Contemporary art gets too much play time in this country for no good reason. But there was a little talk between curators that I attended, where the idea was expressed that curating was and had been for quite a time a part of the art product itself. I suppose it is. If it is, it parallels with another creeping phenomenon. In ‘The X-Factor’ the judges, who then become curators of the singers, have become the centre of attraction. Glamour accretes around them. It reminds me of how accountants, now (when they can manage this) called consultants, have acquired strange glamour, so that working for, say, Accenture is seen as a sexy job rather than the dull bean counter role it used to be viewed as. Those closest to money now have the power to also sex themselves up. It is the equivalent to an ape putting on false eyelashes and lipstick, and, many now seem to want to tart themselves up in that way.
Marx, in Prawer’s translation, says it well:
“What I am and what I can do is not at all determined by my individuality. I am ugly but can buy myself the most beautiful woman in the world, for the effect of ugliness, its power to repel, has been annihilated by money…Does not money transform all my incapacities into their opposite?”
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