High Concepts and Low Morality

When Vice said that Martin Shkreli was claiming that his market manipulating antics are performance art, it was too good to be true. He did do an interview in which he achieves the apparently impossible - making him appear even more hateful - and between sounding like a teenage boy who has listened to a bit too much hip-hop and is threatening his Latin teacher for giving him a low grade, Shkreli refers to his financial activity as selling drugs (see what he did there? Gangster to the max, bro'). And there's this gem.

It makes you wonder what art is. To me, what I’m doing right now in the media, raising prices, all this shit, believe what you want, but it’s interesting. It gets people talking. At the end of the day, that’s what art is.

Thank goodness that discussion's over. It's been a struggle to get a clear definition of art - there has even been attempts to define assassination as performance art.  Shkreli avoids the nitty-gritty of specific forms and contexts, and sees it in terms of its consequences: it gets people talking. Like Star Wars.

Let's assume he is right, and this isn't just a desperate attempt to justify his willingness to make cash money off suffering. 

His behaviour actually reads more like a patron's position: he's got the loot, he spends it on art, and there is no obligation for a patron to be a good person or have any taste. I mean, Cesare Borgia, right?

My new pal Diderot would probably agree. In his treatise in defence of his (badly received) plays, he sees the role of theatre in a social context. He's weaponising theatre to make it a tool for bourgeois revolution, so he wouldn't mind The Shkrel's big wallet bragging. 

In fact, his description of the genius - extreme sensibility and moments of calm, even cold, action - is mirrored in that DX interview. Anyone who reacts to RZA's dissing by waving a metaphorical pistol, but can also raise prices on a product that is essential to the survival of the customer is totally a gangster, and conforms to Diderot's definition of genius.

Then there's the precedent of Marina Abramovic. Once upon a time, she did some intriguing art, examining the nature of gender, desire, the boundaries of art itself. Now she tries to make the green off her own myth. Grant Morrison (off comics) said that making money in Hollywood is a form of magic. 

And despite Shkreli's dubious assertion that there hasn't been a really rich rapper, his mate Jay-Z does something similar. Oh yeah, he completely used Abramovic. It's making sense.

Then there is Kanye West. Anita Sarkeesian has something to say - it did get people talking, didn't it? Although I encourage the belief that it is the interpretation rather than the art that generates meaning, allowing Kanye's Monster video to operate as a critique of objectification rather than a celebration, I have sympathy with her position. 

So yeah, I think Martin is totally doing art. There isn't a genre for it yet - performance art would be a place-holder label. It's great that he has kept going with the act: getting arrested gets people talking, and he's introduced an element of comedy into a serious narrative. I mean, it got people laughing when he got nabbed for fraud. There's even a sense of natural justice, the wicked getting punished. 

Anita versus Shouty Guys Part One

This is Anita Sarkeesian. Over the past year or so, her YouTube channel, Feminist Frequency has presented a series of short programmes called Tropes Versus Women. Although it revisits an already recognised set of tropes - Women in Refrigerators, for example, has been explored in detail - the specific emphasis on gaming and Sarkeesian's consistent format offers a useful cataloging of both historical and contemporary examples. It increasingly examines the use of anti-feminist tropes within gaming.

Tropes versus Women is not an academic analysis of trope usage. It is clearly, if gently, polemical. While Sarkeesian does not dwell on her overall vision - she'll occasionally mention her resistance to companies that are only about the selling, or slap down neo-liberalism - she removes various examples from their immediate context and places them in a wider, social situation. Her condemnation of the sexualisation of otherwise dynamic female characters draws a sharp contrast with the representation of male characters, and suggests that they reflect a, perhaps unconscious, patriarchal bias. 

Tropes versus Women, however, has become a controversial series. While some of the critiques aimed at the programme are justified (for example, her crowd-funding success has not produced a body of work that reflects her income (yet)), there is a more worrying trend towards personal abuse directed at her. Many commentators (Thunderf00t, Sargon of Akkad) claim that their responses are  reasonable, but the subsequent comments on their videos are frequently violent and aggressive.

Perhaps Sarkeesian's notoriety and popularity are the result of gaming's insecurity about its social and aesthetic status. Her examples of sexualised characters are difficult to ignore, and follow from the critique of comic books and films. Her idea that gaming - with most other artistic forms - is dominated by unquestioned patriarchal norms is not too outrageous. Even the defence of these characters is often that 'they appeal to the demographic'. 

Sarkeesian is interesting because she has attracted so much attention. There are plenty of feminist commentators - Laci Green for example - who attract equal hatred, but other feminist YouTubers who cover similar aesthetic areas, like The Nostalgia Chick, get less grief. Her recent political appeals to the UN, to challenge anti-social on-line behaviour, place her in a category of influence beyond most vloggers.