10.
Conclusion:
The Options of the Latin American Creator

--Epicurus

After the XVI century with the emergence of capitalism and the transformation of the object of common use into merchandise, alienation between people and the product of their work was installed. This fact--caused by the mode of production that came to be imposed as a historical necessity on the new and pressing requirements of humanity in light of the growing development of its productive possibilities--will mark, until its disappearance, our social life. It would also saturate all productive sectors, including the artistic, reinforcing itself, in turn, by the ideological necessity of the emergent bourgeoisie, with arguments that justify its power in the face of the other sectors of society. Art, then, emerges as a carrier of the ideals of beauty and the elevated spiritual values, and it is only authentic and well realized insofar as it is constituted in support of those values and ideals. It is known that the fetishistic character of merchandise conceals the relation of power, that is to say, hides the class quality of the capitalist system and the existence itself of exploitation. This phenomenon which, at the level of art was studied by the German critic Walter Benjamin after WWI in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," changes the work of art into something "unique" and full of "prestige"--or "aura"--which makes it inaccessible for those who do not possess it, is inscribed in the ideological apparatus that justifies the power of the social sector that can buy it, that is, of the sector that "imposes" its values on those who must passively "suffer them," hiding the real character of this unjust relation. Also the form of consumption that this fact establishes--contemplative, impersonal, and passive--is not foreign to the strategy of imposition; the work cannot be touched or modified on pain of "suffering divine punishment" for interfering in the messianic act of transmitting those high values.

The distance between the social and real value of the work of art-- insofar as it is a product of communication whose price can be fixed like that of whatever other product, that is, in accord with the time of social work that is employed in its creation and its ideal monetary value--conceals its use as an instrument of social power. Alvaro de Sá, Brazilian artist and critic, in "Avant-Garde: Product of Communication," says,

Ideal, arbitrary, and artificial value: in spite of the unique object, with changing price, being able to augment, diminish, and newly augment, and vice versa, by speculative situations that the proprietary class establishes in its internal relation and in its own superstructural postulations. Ideal value: it does not correspond to a value of abstract social work, materializing in merchandise; it is the autonomy of the price of the object, or its value in relation to other things, dissimulating the social relations between people, in a classic example of the fetishization of merchandise.

Thus it is that the name itself of the artist (and not his work) contributes to valorize artistic merchandise. His signature is guarantee of authenticity reaffirming the "aura," fetishizing in turn itself and the images or social signs it produces, transcending these to achieve foreign connotations, including those contrary to its wishes. Images and words are constrained to satisfy ideological necessities of the system, constructing an ideal, immutable world without contradictions that hides that social wounds beneath a banalized "veil of signs."

The work, then, is transformed from the supreme fruit of the spirit into a vehicle of the reproduction of capital, including profits that enrich the middlemen, be they gallery owners or pseudo-cultural enterprises of ideological subjection. The producer of art, the sublime artist, is turned into a generator of capital, over which the enterpreneurs sniff out future gains.

The legitimate claim of the artist to live from his work is beyond question. However, in this society the artist has two options: to submit himself to the laws of the market and become alienated from himself and his work, or to create his own alternative channels of production and distribution. To marginalize himself, to close himself off in the "cultural ghetto" based on the supposed total autonomy of art with respect to reality, means to create a market to the degree that it adds an exotic element that betters pricing at the same time that it excites or reveals personal espectativas.

The first option, the mercantile, displaces the use value of the work (aesthetic) to its exchange value (economic), implying the acceptance of the exigencies of the market guided by the interested sectors with what is called the manipulation of tastes, tendencies, standardization, consumerism, etc., above all imposing the rules of a contemplative consumption which reaffirm the passive attitudes so necessary to the conservation of the system. In the words of Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, ". . . art thus mercantilized comes to consecrate the conception of art as production of unique objects, as creative activity itself of exceptional individuals. . . in fact [art is the] production of salable objects or merchandise that, therefore, only arrive at the spectator after passing necessarily through the market to install in [the spectator] the passive, contemplative relation characteristic of traditional art." ("From the Art Critic to the Criticism of Art")

The second option responds to the requirement of Bertolt Brecht: ". . . it will not be a fight over the question of criteria, but a fight for the means of production, the presses." This alternative supposes the control of the means of production and distribution of the work of art on the part of the producers themselves. Not in the sense of amplifying the framework of enterprises, since this is no longer the work's competitive form, which produces alienation, but the productive system in which it is realized. Neither does it extend to the suppression of the market (which would be utopian in this system), nor to struggle for that in which the system is most efficient, public relations, mass distribution, revealing of the "aura," etc.

To control as far as possible all or part of the productive process, without leaving unattended the rules of the market is put forth as revolutionary insofar as the art work recuperates its social function and returns to being a legitimate expression of the society that gives origin to it and not an expression of speculative manipulations or of ideological "discourses." Let it be emphasized: without failing to pay attention to the market because it is in this field that the work produced by alternative circuits will have to struggle counting on its unique weapon: aesthetic functionality, its capacity to "extend the limits."

In this way, the work of art recuperates its power as an instrument of communication (and not only as channeler of gain or hoarder of capital) and its political sense (non-aligned) is made clear insofar as it is a sublimated form of social consciousness and, as such, instrument of knowledge whose function is to help the social production with the proposition of making it to reach more and better levels.

Only the effects and not the causes of the alienation are attacked. Alienation can be overcome only by overcoming that which causes it: the capitalist system of prodution. Nevertheless, insofar as the alternative option generates elements and values that will be able to impose themselve on only the most advanced social regime we recuperate a very efficient instrument of communication that permits us, on saying of the Argentine authors of the work "Tucuman Arde" (1968), they "relocated the signs (works) where they can play a revolutionary role," spreading an art that expressed the point of view of the social sectors most interested in the change of structures, intending in this way to overcome alienation precisely in that which causes it. However, we would be partial if we did not take into account that in Latin America there exist, today, at the end of the twentieth century, processes of socialization of productive sources and--this is not an indispensable opinion--that, in the future, this process is radically accelerated because capitalism has not resolved (on the contrary, it has made them more acute) the terrible economic crises through which millions upon millions of people south of the Rio Bravo are hopelessly moving. In the new type of society which has begun to develop, the artist will "naturally" overcome alienation by neutralizing its causes; creation would be "the most specifically human act," not an expression of an unjust relation but a genuine fruit of "being" bound to the best of itself, superior synthesis of the best of humanity, supreme mouthpiece of true humanism.

It is not strange that artistic production should reflect in its totality the specificity of the human, that it be ideologically distorted by capitalism to such a point that, in this historical stage of imperialist institutional supremacy (read transnationals), art appears as an article of luxury, about which it is permissible to speak only through autonomous "discourse," that is to say, through itself. However, we know, after Bertolt Brecht, that art cannot save itself if it doesn't first save people.

On society assuming total responsibility for the production of the goods necessary for its survival, it also assumes the goods of production corresponding to the cultural area. It assumes them, however, through their true creators, artists, who, from those who are unsalaried at the more or less conspicuous service of hegemonic ideas and values to those who are captains of their destinies, organizing production in agreement with the individual and group necessities of society rising to better material as well as spiritual levels of life.

In relation to this theme Marx said: "In communist society there won't be painters, but people who, among other things, paint." Rúben Yáñez, Uruguayan theater director and actor, in his book "Aesthetics and Marxism, says, "If humanity's nature is to express itself as such through painting, it cannot place painting in a framework such that he makes of it his negation as humanity." To conclude, we paraphrase Epicurus: "What's the good of art but to be at the service of humanity?"