Because of the “crisis” of hypercapitalism that has swept through most of today’s “developed” societies, another attack on the avant-gardes comes to light. The threat weighing against avant-gardes advances in the area of the artwork-event, against avant-garde attempts to welcome the now, no longer even requires Nation-parties. It proceeds “directly” out of market economics. The correlation between this and the esthetic of the sublime is ambiguous, even perverse. The latter, no doubt, continues to be a reaction against the matter-of-fact positivism and calculated realism that governs the forms, as writers on art such as Stendhal, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Andreé Breton all have underlined. Yet there is a kind of collusion between capital and the avant-garde. The forces of skepticism and even destruction that capitalism has put into action––something that Marx never ceased to analyze and identify––have encouraged among artists a mistrust of established rules and a willingness to experiment with various modes of expression, with styles, with ever new materials. There is something of the sublime in capitalist economy. It is not academic, it is not physiocratic, it denies nature. It is, in a sense, an economy regulated by an Idea––infinite wealth or power. It does not provide any example from nature that might verify this Idea. In subordinating science through technologies, it only succeeds in making reality appear increasingly intangible, subject to doubt, unsteady.

Human experience, individual and collective, and the aura that surrounds it are diluted by instant gratification and self-affirmation through success. Even the virtually theological depth of the worker’s condition, and of work itself, which has marked the socialist and labor movements for over a century has been devalued since work has become a monitoring device and manipulator of information. These observations are banal, but what does merit attention is the disappearance of the temporal continuum through which the experience of generations used to be transmitted. The distribution of information is becoming the only criterion of social importance, yet information is by definition a short-lived element. As soon as it is transmitted and share it ceases to be information but has instead become an environmental given; “all is said”––we supposedly “know.” It has been fed into the memory machine. The duration of time it occupies is, so to speak, instantaneous. Between two informations, by definition, nothing happens. A confusion thereby arises between what is of interest in terms of information and in terms of circuitry systems, and another between the avant-garde investigation of that which has just happened––the new––and the Is it happening? , the now.

One has to concede that the art market, subject as are all markets to the sovereignty of the new, can exert a kind of seduction for artists. This attraction has to do with more than just corruption. It exerts itself within the boundaries of a confusion between innovation and the Ereignis that time itself imposes on contemporary capitalism. “Strong” information, if one can call it that, exists in an inverse logic to the significance that can be attributed to it through the code available to its receiver. It is like “noise.” It is easy for the public and for artists, advised by intermediaries––the diffusers of cultural merchandise––to draw from this observation the notion that a work of art is avant-garde in direct proportion to the extent to which it is stripped of meaning. Is it then not rather like an event? Just as with any novelty, it is necessary that the absurdity of the work not discourage buyers. The secret of artistic success, like commercial success, resides in the balance between that which is surprising and that which is “well-known,” between information and code. Innovation in art is such: one resumes already proven formulas, one throws them off kilter by combining them with other, allegedly incompatible formulas, by amalgamations, quotations, ornamentations, pastiches. One can go as far as kitsch or baroque. One flatters the “taste” of a public, and the eclecticism of a sensibility enfeebled by the multiplicity of forms and available objects. In this way one thinks one is expressing the spirit of the moment, whereas one is merely reflecting the spirit of the marketplace. Sublimity no longer is in art, but in speculating on art.

The enigma of Is it happening? nonetheless is not dissipated, nor is the task of painting the indeterminate out of date. The occurrence, the Ereignis, has nothing to do with the petit frisson, the rentable pathos, that accompanies innovation. Hidden in the cynicism of innovation is surely a despair that nothing further will happen. But to innovate means to behave as though any number of things could happen, and it means taking action to make them happen. In affirming itself, will affirms its hegemony over time. It also conforms to the metaphysics of capital, which is a technology of time. Innovation “advances.” The question mark of the Is it happening? arrests. Will is defeated by occurrence. The avant-garde task is to undo spiritual assumptions regarding time. The sense of the sublime is the name of the dismantling.