"infinitely scalable"

Pamela Lee wrote a stunning and incisive piece in this month's issue of ArtForum about making/producing art and its global technologies (of power), referents, and implications. She mobilizes Takashi Murakami as the exemplar, par excellence, of her argument.

A brief recapitulation with interjected commentary:

Beginning with a critique of present-day art criticism, Lee chastises the field for being concerned only with “iconography and representation” to the (almost) total exclusion of the making of the piece, its means of production, and aesthetic and material connections to globalization. She exhorts a look at the “ideologies that sponsor and naturalize” the processes of art-making in order to understand what is fully at stake. Enter Takashi Murakami. The art giant and coiner of Superflat(-as-belonging-to-specifically-Japanese-aesthetic-sensibilities) is really a business. With a nod to Warhol, he has factories (entitled Kaikai Kiki) in two global (with a nod to Sassen) cities – Tokyo and New York. As Lee notes, his art work is very much a part of the global marketplace. Cuddly plush Murakami-manufactured objects and Louis Vuitton handbags are available for public consumption. His work stands as a referent of the global marketplace as well – it picks up the Superflat aesthetic already present in Japanese animation and comics, and the ideology of cuteness (kawai-i) in products/phenomena like Hello Kitty. But his work – and here's where Lee's argument gets piquant – also has a metonymic connection to the global marketplace, and this, according to Lee, has everything to do with the way his art commodities are made.

There are a few kinds of digital graphic manipulation programs. Raster programs, like Photoshop, are resolution dependent, in that, they contain a certain amount of information in each pixel of an image, and all the pixels coalesce into a bitmap. Consequently, you couldn't scale an image to gargantuan proportions, because the amount of information stays the same across scales, so the final image quality would be poor. Likewise with scaling down to the miniscule. By contrast, in vector graphics programs or Bézier programs, like Adobe Illustrator, the images are fully resolution independent, and thus, as Lee doubly underscores, infinitely scalable.

This has enormous implications. A Murakami-made image can easily be scanned and reproduced in all sizes, and projected and im/printed onto any surface. It can be compressed, expanded, enhanced, reconfigured in any imaginable way. It is fully plastic and elastic in the true adjectival meaning of those words. Lee comments: Murakami's ways of doing and making are wholly consistent with the ideology of a world market that sees itself as infinitely scalable: that is to say, without traditional concerns for scale; without fixed determinations and stable, organizing perspectives; and without a center in which a monolithic and controlling referent holds. It explodes the false dichotomy between the purely digital image removed from the human manipulative presence, and the purely human-wrought handcraft, while also both reflecting and standing in for the movements of the global market itself.

Aesthetic production, we must not forget, subscribes to ideologies and has immense political consequences.