What could be a free art

1. Art leaves the market

1. Art of the twentieth century was in a market, in the same meaning as the prehistorical art was in the caves, or sacred art was in the temples.
It was a merchant art, as we say sacred art, art of the caves.

2. Why the past? There is yet a market of art, a market of books, of disks, and, of course, a great market of multimedia. There is a market, but, do we still distinguish in it a contemporary art, as were visible in the market, say, Rembrandt, Turner, César?

3. Ten years ago, I was still convinced that a private market of art was about to be replaced with a public market. The public market changed nothing to the disappearing of art from the market.
We only switch from a private market of art to a market deprived of art.

4. If we look attentively for, perhaps we shall find some interesting works. They merge in the market, rather than they appear in it.
A contemporary art doesn’t appear in the market, while few time ago, we find art nowhere else. It didn’t appear outside.

2. Art and merchandise

5. How did an artist enter the market? With the ancient regime of privileges, he enters it under the guise of the Privilege of the King, with the bourgeois revolutions, he enters it under the guise of his rights of propriety, with the socialist ideas, he enters as an intellectual worker. Since the second world war, the problem gets more complex: cultural salary-man, little businessman…?

6. Why did art enter the market? Because the market was its vehicle.
Art entered first the market with literacy, and literacy with the discovery of printing. Photography, disk, cinema, achieved the whole entrance of art in the market. This period is over.

7. The book was the model of the merchant art. What is a book? For the market, its definition is simple: bonded paper sheets containing linguistics marks, duplicated in several copies. This is a clear definition, but however it supposes that no book existed before the discovery of printing.

8. This definition implies also that a book isn’t made by an author, but by a printer and/or a publisher. (The acknowledgment of a right fixes then the negation of a fact.)

9. The juridical and commercial meaning of the word “book” differs noticeably from its usual meaning in every natural language. This last one supposes the articulation of graphic marks in a coherent set, on any medium.
Those two definitions are even noticeably contradictory, since a one defines the book as independent of any medium, the other assimilates it to the medium.

10. In fact, in the modern world, the book exists only under the form of a manufactured object. In the merchant world, an unpublished book is simply not a book.
Photography, gramophone, the cinema, the radio extended this fact to every artistic activity.

3. Object and language

11. Switching from the analogical devices of copying to the processing ones seems first to be the triumph of the market; actually, that is its death knell.
Why that? because processing implies the contingency of the medium.

12. Data processing doesn’t only make the work free of any medium, it abolishes the separation between writing and editing.
There is no more, on one side, a unique manuscript made by the author, waiting for an editor to become an actual book. The electronic file is immediately reiterable.
Again, the work is no more like a project waiting for its material actualization: the printed book. At the contrary, the printed book is now only a copy, a mere repetition always reiterable of the original work.

13. Here, the technical definition of book joins the one of natural languages, and it rubs off on every artistic creation.
Painter, musician, attempts to consider the electronic document as the actual work.

14. It is not the matter to predict the vanishing of the unique sheet, live music, neither of performance, happening, lecture, but no artist can continue to ignore that his work can get free of a sheet, an instrument, a situation.
Irreversibly he comes to know himself as the author of this part, free of any medium and infinitely repeatable.

15. Let us suppose a very good speaker who would be unable to write, or wouldn’t take care to note, or even would only be unable to write as well as he spoke. Someone would note for him what he would say. Who is the author? The one who speaks, sure, not the scribe.
It was a frequent case during the antiquity (Socrate, Gautama). It takes end with the generalization of writing. The author (has became who) writes.
Now, irresistibly, the author becomes who edits an electronic file.

16. During the twentieth century, we used to say that the publisher made the book, not the author. If you would say “an unpublished book”, you were mended “an unpublished manuscript”. That was not always without reason. There were books made by publishers, not written by authors.

17. Today, an editor is a software, a writing tool. Writing a text has become editing it.
It is the same for music. A musician looks like a sound engineer. The work of an artist moves more and more to what before he left below.

18. In his Aesthetics, Hegel gave to poetry a higher place than to other arts: it alone could get emancipated from any medium and, then, from space and time. Obviously, the other arts follow it in this way.

19. How do the other arts manage to follow the same way than poetry? (It is not the matter to analyze here how art emancipates itself from any medium during the two last centuries, even if such an analyze is unavoidable, but to know how, empirically, it does now.)
— Becoming an digital file, immediately and infinitely reiterable? Not only.
— Getting immediately edited by the author himself? Not any more.
They follow it becoming also, essentially, documents composed with graphical marks; becoming, on some way, text, at least language, owning a textual nature.

20. Art leaves the market like this: it gets out of manufactured thing, that is merchandise.
Art ceases to remain in the market and enter language.

4. The linguistic object

21. We could say that art exits the market to enter the noosphere, or to become immaterial. That would resolve no ambiguity about what we can understand with token, language or text.

22. As complex as could be the notion of digital document, it is not dim. It is only complex in the way it supposes a vertical architecture of different languages: text in natural language converted in programming languages, converted in numerical languages, converted in binary language.

23. In this architecture, text in natural language can be turned in images, sound, or in about everything intuitive for the senses.
This first intuitive layer takes place on the surface of some different levels of languages, which become more and more unintelligible as to binary sequences.

24. In the world that is ending, the model of the actual work was the printed book. What is it today? The file in a proprietary format? The same in a public format? The source? The hexadecimal code? The binary one?
This question is less complex than it means first. The actual work is the editable work (editable and not only replicable), which is written in a transparent format, and whose source code can be freely and easily replicated and modified.

5. The spectacular merchant art

25. The market pertains to customers. They can constitute a lightened elite as well as a wide popular audience. Anyway, they are customers.
The merchant art is essentially determined by its customers. If it pertains to avant-gardist customers, it is an avant-gardist art, if it pertains to popular customers, it is a popular art.

26. The merchant art is determined by a clear-cut boundary between producers and customers: the creator and his public. The more famous is the first, the more anonymous are the others.

27. The merchant artwork, as every merchandise, can be declined in several versions: some unique and expensive artworks reserved to some amateurs, numbered and limited proofs, cheap editions. It could also give place to by-products.
The same artwork can be declined for different audiences, and even for every audience. This way, a merchant artwork can keep an elitist nature and be famous and known by everybody.

28. The clear separation between the creator and his customers, that is fulfilled in the art object, implies that consummation must not change the integrity of this object. The art object must not be altered in its consummation. This one must be only contemplative, spectacular.

6. Art and intellectual work

29. The market of art separated any artistic work from all other forms of intellectual work. The market separated art from sciences, philosophy, mathematics, logics… from all the other intellectual productions that cannot product artistic objects.

30. Sure, we can sell a book of mathematics or of physics like any other book. We can also sell any manufactured object which is a direct application of a scientific discovery, and the brevet of which has the same function as a copyright.
However, there isn’t a scientific market, a philosophical, or a mathematical one, even under the form of a market of brevets, like there is a market of art.

31. The market of art functions with some customers — direct consumers — and it is what differs and isolates it from all other intellectual activities.
“Art is producing works”, we say, and the works, in a market, become merchandises.
An intellectual activity that would not product immediately some merchandises would not be an art.

32. Art becomes less and less easily a merchandise. It is due, partly, to the self evolution of art and, partly, to the evolution of the market and of the merchandise.
The market becomes less and less free; art, more and more.

7. The contradictions of the merchant art

33. Actually, art doesn’t want to exit the market, the market want no more to evict art, and their divorce engenders funny contradictions. One of them is the “Bovary effect”.

34. In the merchant art, the artist painted his world (no more an “other world”) and identified himself in it. “Bovary, it’s I” said Flaubert during his lawsuit.
At the end of the twentieth century, the world identified itself to the artist: “Flaubert, it’s I” Bovary would have said.

35. It is not comical that an art would be done by everybody for everybody, but such an art would be likely different from a merchant art.
Let us suppose that the lecturers of a novel would read only to learn how to write novels. We would enter a gallery only to learn how to paint. The market could be changed, and, deeply, the nature of the art and the methods of creation.

36. Those funny contradictions open the new epoch. The market of art is nothing else now but the one of those funny contradictions.

8. Programming and intellectual work

37. The market separated art and intellectual life. Art gets free by breaking this separation.
One part of the (merchant) art gets free (by getting out) of the market, another one get out of the market of art and creates the one of culture and entertainment.

38. The liberation of art and the reconstruction of the intellectual work occur principally around the programming and with its help.
In practice, data processing, personal computer and the internet are the main tools for the liberation of art. For a deeply sight, the epistemological quality of the phenomenon gives new paradigms. (Such a vocabulary, ask for more explanations than it gives.)

39. Getting free of the market, art finds more direct grasps on the real. It distances itself from the object, the artwork, the merchant product, for the benefit of the symbolical dimension, semeiotical, semantical, poetical, pragmatical or performative ones.
This way, it becomes essentially intellectual work.

40. In the same time, sciences and mathematics follow some ways that converge with the artistic one. Here again, programming takes a determining place.

9. Intellectual work and intuition

41. Mathematics adopted a new course with the generalization of the data processing, with the ability to use computers to effect calculations that would have been inconceivable before.
Then, a new mathematic appears, based on the experience and the observation of “digital phenomenons”, and no more on hypothesis and deduction only.

42. Inversely, natural sciences don’t any more resort to automatic models, that is, they approach natural phenomenons through programs that simulate them.
They discover then mathematical behaviors common to different phenomenons, or crossing over different disciplines, for example, climatology and economy.

43. While, for a long time, the goal was phenomenons modelling, the model itself behaves as a natural phenomenon.
Or again, while the sentence attempted to be an explanation, a description, a demonstration of phenomenons (what is well conceived is clearly stated), it becomes what needs elucidation (what is well stated must be clearly conceived).

44. A great part of the cognitive activity belonging to reason can be left to processing devices. (Let us understand “artificial intelligence” as cognitive prostheses, as we could tell “artificial perception” auditing or ophthalmic prosthesis, even if glasses do not see anything by themselves.)
Human intellectual work is then essentially turned toward intuitive perception.

45. Mathematics and sciences join here aesthetics, not in searching the beauty, neither the truth, but the intuition.

46. “We know that this statement is true. We even know that it can actuate the real and change it. But we do not understand what it means.”

47. “Up to now, the philosophers had only interpreted the world, we have now to interpret their statements.” This can be conceived as a stupid completion for the last centuries of modernity.
It is, on the whole, what is proposed under the name of “Culture”. The stake is to avoid such a stupidity.

48. Beauty is the appearing essence, said approximately Hegel in his Aesthetics. We can consider appearance as contingent, but what would be an essence that wouldn’t appear?
If we conceive appearance as an appearing, then we conceive actuality as an actualization.

49. In the classic model, the scientist tried to interpret reality (to describe, to explain, to deduct it), and the artist tried to show it, to make it intuitive. Those two tracks merge and get over: the statement becomes program.
The statement has to be intuitive and programative (performative?) at the same time. Both necessities make a one.

10. The double merchant deadlock

50. Getting out of the market, art meets some risks. The first is to lose any shelter. It may change its place in the market: from producer it was, it may become a consumer — a consumer of informations, of publications, of wares, softwares and hardwares — at least a consumer of technics and even of sciences.

51. If art must be done by anyone for anyone, it constitutes probably a huge market. The artistic production would no more continue to product in this market, but would consume.
We can understand then that many artists would have conservative stances considering this outlook. However, what can they hope?

52. In such a market, artists can only claim of a professional status in becoming publicists. (A good photograph, for instance, would work with a film maker and would be sponsored by it.)
Why not? Art has never been feed by less contestable resources. The problem is elsewhere: if such conditions provide an actualization of art, the artists would accept it. Will those conditions enable it?

53. If the market of art comes to get a market of consumption, after having been a market of works, then, artwork would have to give way to talent.
We can compare with sport: professional athlete sells his talent. Indirectly, he favors the sale of manufactured wares that he doesn’t product, and sponsored him.

54. We could imagine artists doing performances. However, precise rules would lack to count scores.

55. Let us suppose that we distinguish professionals and amateurs with sales, amount of total sales, public audience…: isn’t it a vicious circle?
Is an athlete well-known because he is a professional, or is he a professional because he is well-known? He is both because he makes high scores.
The market of art has soon walked this way. And what appends? Art exits the market.

11. Calculus and language

56. Art would be more seriously threatened to become a single consummation of sciences and technics; but here, the threat would be more heavy for them.
A computer is above all a device that executes calculations. This is an obviousness that tends to be hidden. Then, the consumed sciences and technics would be the calculus ones.

57. What are mathematics? We may differentiate the question: Are mathematics a language? Or, do they exist independently of their language?
This is a very complex question that we may diverge again: Does the plural of mathematics mean some languages plurality? Or, at the contrary, would a plurality of mathematics get unified by a single language?

58. The tacit option of modernity seems to be that many mathematics are unified by a single language.
This is only a tacit option, and it could make angry if we tried to justify it. Nothing is less clear, in the contemporary culture, than a possible relationship between mathematical language and a hypothetical referent.

59. An unified language for mathematics could have been considered as a good thing in the beginning of the twentieth century. A century later, we have some reasons to wonder if an excessive complexity of mathematics is not due to what was supposed to simplify them.

60. Are mathematics independent from language? It is as if we asked if the world would be independent of the English: the actual, natural, irrational, imaginary world. However, English can describe it; it can also describe, explain or paraphrase the mathematical language.
We could think, in some case, that the great difficulty of problems and, mainly, the great partitioning of mathematics could benefit from a wider use of natural language.

61. Mathematics would be, not God’s language, as it seemed obvious to some initiators of the modernity, but Nature’s one.
We still have to know to what extend mathematics would be a language, and if they relationship with the physical world has a linguistic nature.

62. In what extend a mathematical proof can state a certainty? In what extend mathematical proof and certainty are not contradictory words? Certainty belongs to synthetical intuition; proof, to analytical deduction. The whole problem is to state deduction on intuition. (Is the contrary conceivable?)

63. Contemporary mathematics suppose a huge trust in a language, a confidence widely overcoming the reason. (“Mathematical language shows off more efficient than reasonable”, said Winner on 1960.)

12. New Babel

64. Mathematical formalism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, didn’t offer what we expected from it, but what we didn’t.
If we had believed it will help us to think, or only to calculate, we had wrong, but it had efficiency to make machines calculate for us.

65. Machines don’t calculate as we do. They handle some binary sequences that we hardly decipher. We don’t venture, anyway, we convert them in other languages. Those languages have some characters of natural languages — English —, and some of logical and mathematical ones: the source code.

66. From the source code, we can go to the mathematical languages, to the natural ones, to the machine ones, to the “languages” of sense: sound, images, texture…

67. The formal mathematical language doesn’t work here as a universal language. There is no universal language, but a flowering of languages, of different levels, which, this time, by contrast with the myth of Babel, doesn’t seem to divide, nor to discourage the builders.

13. Lecture, writing and edition

68. “If the generalization and the development of operating systems based on graphical and metaphorical improved interfaces make the use of a computer accessible for whose don’t know its functioning, they remote and hide the true nature of the processing program and its metaphysical potential.” Bluescreem (<http://www.b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net/>)

69. At the end of the twentieth century, some people believed that the end of writing had came. The contrary happened: everything has become text.
The worlds “source code” are very explicit. The code is the source of everything. The source is free when it’s readable, and it’s readable when the code is explicit or competed along with commentaries.

70. At the beginning of the merchant modernity, intellectual life concerned a cultured elite, well defined in some european capitals or gravitating around. Making his work public implicitly meant to make it known by this elite. Today, about everybody can virtually discourse with the whole world in a quasi universal language.
Of course, this eventuality is always virtual. On the other extremity, a private communication is threatened. Every actual communication takes place between those two inaccessible poles: universal and private.

71. If nevertheless a homogeneous elite composed with well-known personalities continued to live, they would barely give something else than a show business of intellectual life.
Its production would take its place in a mass market of culture and entertainment.

72. The purpose of writing, before, was the production of an edited text. It is now the production of an editable one —or music, images…

73. The question of the right to use, to copy, to diffuse and to modify freely is soon a rear guard problem. The actual problem is to have the ability (and not only the right) to edit.
An intellectual work could be nothing else than editable. The concept of edition replaces the lecture and the writing ones and unifies them.

14. Freedom and legibility

74. Nobody knows exactly today what means free art. It is a new idea, never evoked before. People claimed a revolutionary art, a militant art, art for art, an art for everyone made by everyone, an independent art, a popular art, a democratic art… no one had never seriously thought that an art could be free, neither how.

75. In some way, free art takes its place in the extension of which of the twentieth century one, and adds nothing notably new. In some way, it recognizes its precepts in the ones of the Free Foundation Software.
Till now, there is an unthought relationship between free and legible. We have now to understand better what could be such a legibility for art.

What could be a free art?