Art, journalism and economics in the age of reproduction
‘I suggest the idea that information processing is most productive when it is embedded in material production or in the handling of goods, instead of being disjointed in a stepped up technical division of labor.’ (Castells 1996)
Castells writes that the Japanese economoy, which during the 1970s and 1980s was one of the most competitive economies among major economies, was successful because it had the lowest information to goods employment ratio.
He argues that the information services provides a ‘stepped up technical division of labor’ a situation that draws parallels to the surreal bureaucratic dystopia displayed in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. The film depicts an information economy where people are employed for what seems to be the sole purpose of moving, or pushing information. Castells informationalist economy has created a workforce similar to the workforce in Brazil of ‘knowledge workers’ (Drucker 1959) whose sole purpose is to manage information.
Castells has a valid in point in suggesting that an economy is more productive when information processing is embedded in material production. Without the tangibility of material production the economy will crumble by trading in “hollow empty objects” (Kitching 2008), reaching an absurd situation similar to a Beckett play where the trading of information becomes a dialogue about nothing. It is a postmodern literary dilemma that has now surfaced in the global financial markets, people have been trading information, talking about nothing, and now that nothing has been undressed and brought into the stage spotlights in its all its empty and naked glory.
This provides an insightful lesson to a journalist who’s duty is to produce information. A journalist produces content and should derive that content directly from the source. The ‘citizen and participatory journalism’ featured in the blogosphere and paraded as the future of journalism fundamentally feeds not on the primary source but the secondary sources of established news organizations as revealed in ‘Journalism’s Backseat Drivers’ (Palser 2005), bloggers act as “conduits between the mainstream media and the online zeitgeist”.
These journalists are not hunting down the raw information but relying on the secondary source information, this is also evident in the established news organizations who due to time-restrictions are beginning to source their information from public relations offices and press agents. If journalists continue to reproduce, rework and recycle secondary information, the economy of information, as opposed to the information economy, will collapse. It is like duplicating a duplicate of a duplicate. A bootleg of a bootleg, an upteenth generation recording on a cassette tape deteriorates and soon it is nothing but noise. Truth will collapse and there is no government agency that has the desire or the ability to bail out truth.
In art the problems of reproduction have been addressed since Andy Warhol, who began his practice at the beginning of the ‘post-industrialist society’ that is discussed by Castells. The 1936 essay by Walter Benjamin ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin says that a work of art will loses Aura as it becomes reproduced by machines in magazines and postcards. The Aura was the cultural value given to an artwork and did not exist in the object itself but was formed through external attributes, such as its ownership, restricted access through exhibitions and its publicized authenticity. Artists in the post-industrialist era began to search for new ways of instilling value in works and they did this through creation of concepts, artists became purveyors of ideas, and the ideas themselves became the commodity that artists would trade.
Concepts and truth are regarded almost as two opposing forces on the information spectrum, concepts are subjective and truth is objective, and journalists need to safeguard the ‘aura’ of truth in order for journalism to survive an informationalist era that seems to be feeding on the thriving abstracts in the hyperreality where we simulate something that never really existed (Baudrillard 1988) .
You can see a situation where I am generating art without tangibly producing art on a blog I have recently begun called Comings and Goings. It is a situation where I document myself entering my studio with the purpose to make art, the art produced is never shown. The artwork in this case is my action or my idea of ‘intending to make art’.