Philosophy Club: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene

The current ecological crisis brings about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances creates interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. For Nicolas Bourriaud artists are the anthropologists of this new era. They acknowledge the fading of the division between nature and culture, which has been the matrix of segregation for millenia. Capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, social segregation, the exploitation of land, subsoil, and animals—all are based on status distinctions between subject and object. Against the commodification of natural elements, Bourriaud sees a new generation of artists calling for a molecular anthropology that studies the human effects on the universe and the interaction between humans and nonhumans. Contemporary art reconnects to archaic magic, the witches, sorcerers, and shamans of precapitalist societies. Against the devitalization of the world, art has managed to preserve certain aspects of the social function and spiritualist practices of these societies.