Let us consider another example of a curated atmosphere and its desiring afects. The Russian premiere of the film France (2021), directed by the French arthouse director Bruno Dumont, took place in September 2021 in the newly rebuild cinema Khudozhestvenny, located in heart of Moscow in Arbat Square. The rebuilding of Khudozhestvenny (literally “artistic”) was celebrated in the national and international press, as, first opened in 1909, one of the oldest cinemas in the world. Its lavish renovation attracted the interest of the city’s contemporary cultural scene and was reported in global news. Bruno Dumont, winner of two Palm D’Or awards in Cannes and known for films that portray working-class life, is an arthouse director popular with cinephiles, left-wing cineastes, and the creative class. Since its opening, Khudozhestvenny has built a partnership with the haute-couture brand Gucci, whose logos and advertisements were displayed in diferent parts of its premises. During the premiere, a Gucci fashion exhibition was on display in the main foyer of the cinema, right next to the entrance to Dumont’s film. The premiere was attended by people with symbolic, cultural, and often economic capital in the Russian context. This assemblage qualified an atmosphere blending Dumont’s arthouse credentials and Gucci’s luxury fashion taste in a lavishly restored 1909 cinema combined with the presence of international middle-class crowds. Dumont’s symbolic capital as an arthouse director and thus as someone who creates art “independently”, Gucci’s highbrow elegance, the history of the building, including the likes of Sergey Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, and the refined visitors gathered in an atmosphere of sophisticated coolness: “something important is going on here”. This “something important is going on here” is a key atmospheric condition of the Warhol Economy.
The concept of the Warhol Economy is useful as we can extrapolate the analytical perspective in relation to banal luxury that (a) grapples with the productive side of creative networks, (b) emphasizes the synergies between creative spheres for maintaining network flows, and (c) highlights how semiotic diference needs to be curated so as to appear “cool” and partake a value regime in capitalism economy. To extend and de-fetishize the New York-ness of the concept, we can then speak of global Warhol economies, which, apart from being territorially contained, are online, mobile, and transnational. Such cultural economies involve the coming together of international flows of coolness, ranging from an Asian restaurant in Berlin and an art biennial in Guangzhou to the digitally native musical style Vaporwave, and Instagram accounts on socialist architecture. These flows are interweaving physical connectivities locally composed of art openings, parties, concept stores, fashion shows, underground concerts, and so on, and virtual ones in social media and platforms facilitating distant interaction. Both online and ofline converge in flows and particular moments that spill over into broader society; for curating coolness in the Athens Biennale, for instance, Paul Robeson had to appear as a “black activist” instead of “communist” or “Stalinist” in the descriptive texts of the actual exhibition and the online spaces that the biennial navigates or exhibition reviews and the public discourse about Robeson in Athens Biennale.12 Warhol Economies then capitalize on semiotic diferences for generating cool atmospheres across the interweaving between the physical and digital. One such economy is the field of banal luxury.
Atmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital Warhol Economies
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