ABSTRACT
The subject I would like to tackle here: the role of the public and the publics in art and in present cultural action. I use the term cultural action because I believe that, as already explained by Neil and Marysia, art has reconverted into a practice that participates in the constitution of a symbolic economy, that is to say, in the circulation of signs of value. Through a technological and politicohistorical transformation-end of the cold war and the narratives that legitimized the detention of power in that context-we inhabit a real virtuality that, as Castells explained, not only configures our consciousness but also increases the diversity of norms that guide differentiated consciousnesses at the same time as it makes it difficult for one generalized authority, and even common communication protocols, to impose itself. In this context, culture has little to do with notions of transcendence according to the legacy of the aesthetic ideal, which goes back to Immanuel Kant; distinction in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological model; and even of the self-regulating disciplining of subjects in the line of inquiry that Michel Foucault initiated and that Tony Bennett extended to art in The Birth of the Museum. As Charles Esche argued, with the disappearance of European social democracy of the welfare state in the United States and even in some Latin American countries, culture molds itself more and more as a resource with which to solve social and economic problems; that is, it is evaluated and justified in terms of utility, both inside governments and across international cooperation agencies and the prolific world of nongovernmental organizations. It is worth noting that the submission to a mediation based on utility does not mean that the argument of the autonomy of art has been completely lost. But even that autonomy has a place in the machinery of the production and circulation of value if we consider that what comprises the essence of art and creativity function as the engine for the generation of innovation in the so-called new economy. All of this rhetoric surrounding creativity erases the violence that configures what we believe to be the public sphere and the state that must care for it.
