Dark matter, the art world and Stephanie LaCava's 'The Superrationals'
What about the dark matter at the heart of the art world itself? Consider the structural invisibility of most professionally trained artists whose very underdevelopment is essential to normal art-world functions. Without this obscure mass of ‘failed’ artists the small cadre of successful artists would find it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain the global art world as it appears today.
- Taken from ‘Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture’ by Gregory Sholette, 2010.
Lately I’ve been wondering how many hours of my life I’ve clocked up wishing that I was rich. Wondering how many walks to work I’ve spent allocating chunks of my huge hypothetical lottery win. I imagine liberating my talented friends from the drudgery of shitty low-paid jobs so that they can focus on their art. If I could get paid by the hour for all of this daydreaming would I have enough money to live it? One of the problems with having so little income is how much of your precious time it takes up. The hours spent scheming, planning and imagining something better. I don’t think people really talk about that.
There have been times in my life when I might have read Stephanie LaCava’s new novel The Superrationals (published by Semiotexte, 2020) in a state of hot jealousy. LaCava’s main character, a young woman named Mathilde, lives an enviable lifestyle on paper. She is beautiful but ‘unconventionally’ so and is the daughter of a dead but revered editor mother. She lives in New York but travels, ricocheting between New York, Paris, Munich, London and Berlin and works for a high-end art dealer. Perhaps when I was younger and less critical of the art world I would’ve wanted to be Mathilde. Nowadays I can rarely afford to be so naive.
There is a Greek chorus of bitchy gallery girls in New York/Paris/London who provide an unnervingly hostile backdrop for the novel to take place against and narrate it with their sharp-tongued observations. ‘We decided we didn’t like Mathilde even before we met her. In our sisterhood, objective reality played no part, it was easy to dislike someone we knew so little about.’ They spit the kind of shallow venom that you suspect people might say behind your back but hope that in reality you’re just being paranoid. Once my friend, newly inducted into the moneyed art world, lay on my couch with a hot cup of herbal tea after a night out and plied me with its salacious gossip between sips. I lapped it up, my paranoia curbed significantly by my good fortune of being an absolute nobody.
I suppose people can’t help the stepping-stones of inherited wealth and nepotism that hurry them into careers before the rest of us have barely made it out of school. Mathilde and her best friend Gretchen, though practically interchangeable in terms of their illustrious family history, offer different approaches to this particular kind of hot rich art-girl privilege. Where Mathilde is measured, neat and hardworking, Gretchen is sloppy, unreliable and jet-lagged on a cocktail of Klonopin and booze. Mathilde’s studious search for meaning in life is laid out in her (presumably deliberately) middling graduate thesis: ‘Transmuting Desire: Memory, Mannequins, and The Contemporary Reliquary, An Exploration of the Unsaid, Unseen, Uncanny, Space, the In Between’, excerpts of which crop up throughout the book and offer a mirror to Mathilde’s quarter-life crisis.
Despite almost bucking under the weight of the working class chip on my shoulder I found myself warming to Mathilde. She reminded me of the sweet girls I worked alongside during the one brief time in my life I had any proximity to the art world: daughters of lawyers, gallery owners and business executives, all of them desperate to exchange their inherited wealth for cultural capital—begging to become the blank canvas their prestigious bosses could project their own images upon. Once when I was interning I was asked to serve drinks unpaid for an exhibition opening. I already worked in a bar for minimum wage and so the request hurt my pride, but one of the other girls graciously offered herself up in my place and networked all evening with a bottle in hand while I sulked in a corner. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because of this unrelenting working class hero attitude that I’ve really struggled to get ahead.
Holed up together in a hotel room in Paris, Gretchen and Mathilde bicker over the romantic relationships they’ve fled in order to disentangle from. Yet there’s tenderness in their persistence to remain in close proximity, to hold tightly to each other against their fickle disposability in the art world. Mathilde says pityingly of Gretchen, ‘She went through her days trying to derail her life and her privilege, never quite succeeding.’ Though it seems to be Mathilde who is trying to derail her own life and privilege despite its material advantages. Where Gretchen wallows in her wealth, treating the art world and its inhabitants as disposable as she blasts through obsessions with little care or thought for her future, Mathilde pushes back against her tokenistic status as a sales prop, hired for her looks and heritage. But her attempts are mostly futile; she’s doomed to toil as the disposable sacrifice to the beast of the art world.
Despite all of its cloaking and mysticism, the art world is an industry that operates like any other, where workers produce surplus value for a miniscule fraction of the population. It is not exempt from the jaws of predatory capital at the top. Galleries and institutions such as TATE, MoMa, the Louvre and the V&A have all been fattened on blood money donated by the Sackler family, the legalised cartel behind the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. According to P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) a foundation set up by photographer Nan Goldin, the worldwide death toll for opioid addiction and overdose currently stands at 400,000 and growing. The Sackler family recently plead guilty in court on three charges including bribing doctors to prescribe OxyContin unnecessarily and agreed to pay a few billion dollars in fines, barely a dent in the hundreds of billions they have made from OxyContin. Shielded by the god-like power of wealth, not a single member of the Sackler family will face prison time for the hundreds of thousands they have willingly slaughtered for profit. Their philanthropy, which mostly takes the form of charitable trusts, is little more than a grotesque display of reputation laundering, making donations to high profile arts and culture institutions in exchange for a cleaner, less bloodthirsty prestige.
The entrails of this corrupt seediness, unlike the wealth it hoards, trickles down. The bitch chorus speculate that Mathilde’s professional status is the consequence of some kind of sexual exchange. ‘Charles hired her because he thinks she’s hot,’ they conspire after calling her relationship with her partner ‘a Honeytrap kind of thing.’ These accusations might sound spiteful but there’s truth buried in the gossip. When Mathilde meets Tom, an artist whom she barely knows, she fucks him in his hotel’s communal bathtub. After the encounter she remarks, ‘It was intimate because I didn’t know this person at all.’ Tom’s lack of status provides respite from a certain degree of transactional sexuality expected of Mathilde, and so she is able to find some comfort in sharing intimacy with a fellow non-person. Near the end of the book Mathilde is sexually assaulted. There is a cruel inevitability as Mathilde’s head is forced into her assailant’s groin, her shyness interpreted as coy consent. Despite her wealth and privilege, and the connections these things offer, Mathilde is ultimately trapped in an underclass for whom power and success is just another brick in the foundation that upholds the parasitic tendencies of the super rich.
The final pages of the book bear an uncanny resemblance to the first, with Mathilde and Gretchen walking together through a train station preparing to spin off in new geographical locations. Back in New York, the bitch chorus remark, ‘It’s so much better here without her’ as they clean out Mathilde’s desk to make room for a new cookie-cutter replacement. Although I wouldn’t pass on the opportunity to tour the world’s city playgrounds and sleep in fancy hotels, I don’t envy Mathilde. We all might want more comfort and money but I’m also happy with my status as a relative nobody. I’m content to spend my time dreaming of something better and scheming towards my own version of success as opposed to being crushed under the reality of somebody else’s.
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