Art for the Market

A fourth phase of aesthetization of the world is established, remodeled in essence, logical marketing and extreme individualization. The modernist culture, dominated by a subversive logic in war against the bourgeois world, follows a new universe in which the vanguards are integrated in the economic order, accepted, wanted, supported by official institutions. With the triumph of artistic capitalism, aesthetic phenomena no longer be returning to the small peripheral worlds and universes built on marginal production, marketing and communication material goods, are huge markets shaped by international economic giants.

At the time aesthetization of consumer markets, capitalism multiplies the artistic styles, trends, shows, places of art, continuously launches new fashions in all sectors and creates large-scale dream, imagination, emotions; artialize the domain of everyday life at the same time that contemporary art, for its part, is committed to a broad desdefinition process. A desdefinition art, however, involves a novel form of aesthetic experience. It is a world of superabundance or aesthetic inflation that combines our eyes: one transaesthetic world, a kind of hiperart where art infiltrates in the industries in all the interstices of trade and ordinary life. The mastery of style and emotion spent the hyper regime: this does not mean perfect and finished beauty, but generalization of aesthetic strategies for commercial purposes in all sectors of consumer industries.

A hiperart also as no longer symbolizes a cosmos or expresses transcendent narratives, it is not the language of a social class, but works as a marketing strategy, valuation distracting, seductive games ever renovated to capture the hedonistic desires of the new consumer and increase the turnover of brands. We are currently in the strategic and commercial state of the aesthetization of the world, in transaesthetic age.

Increasingly, cultural or creative industries operate in hyperbolic mode with movies with huge budgets, creative advertising campaigns, television shows diversified television broadcasting programs that blend the classical and the music-hall, architectures, sculptures of great effects, video clips delirious, gigantic amusement parks, pop concerts with "extreme" scenarios. Nothing escapes the image and fun network and everything is spectacular intersects with the commercial imperative: the artistic capitalism created a fertile transaesthetic empire where they mix design and star system, creation and entertainment, culture and show business, art and communication, and cutting edge fashion. A communication and commercial hyperculture seeing degrade the classical oppositions of the famous "society of spectacle": creative transaesthetic capitalism does not work with the separation, with the division, but with the cross, with the plot of areas and genres. The ancient kingdom of the show disappeared, was replaced by hiperspectacle which consecrates democratic culture and shopping fun. 

Commercial strategies of transaesthetic creative capitalism no longer save any sphere. Common objects are invaded by the style and the look, many of them become fashion accessories. Designers, visual artists, fashion designers are invited to redesign the look of industrial commodities and the temples of consumption. Fashion brands from the general public copy the codes of luxury. Shops, hotels, bars and restaurants invest in your images, the decor, the customization of their spaces. The heritage is rehabilitated and staged in the manner of screenplays. Urban scenarios are retouched, staged, "disneyfied" with the intent of tourism consumption. Advertising wants to be creative and fashion shows seem performances. The Architectures images flourish, value in themselves, by their attraction for its spectacular size and function as promotional vector in competitive markets for cultural tourism.

The terms used to designate the occupations and economic activities also have the mark of aesthetic ambition, gardeners have become landscapers, hairdressers hair designers, florists floral artists, cooks culinary creators, jewelers jewelers artists, tailors artistic directors, car manufacturers “car creators". Frank Gehry is celebrated everywhere as the artist architect. Even some business men are described as "visionary artists" (Steve Jobs). While economic competition are unleashed, capitalism works to build and disseminate an artistic image of his actors to artialize economic activities. The art became a mean of legitimizing brands and companies of capitalism.

The extraordinary extent of transaesthetic logic is also seen in geographical terms. We are in the time of globalized capitalism to impel a stylization of mass consumption that is no longer confined to the West. In the five continents are working creative industries, creating products with style, fashion, entertainment, culture of globalized masses.

But the process of aesthetization hypermodern overflows in much the spheres of production, consumption conquered, aspirations, ways of life, the relationship with the body, the view of the world. The taste for fashion, the performances, the music, tourism, heritage, for cosmetics, for home decor became widespread in all strata of society. The artistic capitalism spurred the realm of the aesthetic towards hyper overabundant consumption of some styles, but more broadly, in the etymological sense of the word, of the Greeks, of sensations and sensitive experiences.

Capitalism has led not so much a process of impoverishment or delinquency of aesthetic existence but the democratization of mass of a homo aestheticus of an unprecedented kind. The transaesthetic individual is reflective, eclectic and nomadic: less conformist and more demanding than in the past, appears at the same time as a consumption "junkie", obsessed with disposable expediency, the easy entertainment.  

At aesthetization of the economic world answers an anesthetization of the ideal life, an aesthetic attitude toward life. Nobody wants to live and to sacrifice for principles and outdoor goods to himself, but if you invent it yourself, create your own rules to a better life, immense, rich in emotions and shows.