{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","uuid":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","normalized_title":"curationintheageofplatformcapitalismthevalueofselectionnarrationandexpertiseinnewmediacultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","isbns":["9781032023007","9781032023014","9781003182801"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":177,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Curation%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Platform%20Capitalism%20%20The%20Value%20of%20Selection%2C%20Narration%2C%20and%20Expertise%20in%20New%20Media%20Cultures","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/search"},"page":{"printed_page":86,"pdf_page":96,"physical_index":96,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e7a3a5788f950919cea9efe99eb21f34ad23eeb4ddefc916dc6030957cb05eb7"},"chapter":"CURATION IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM","content":"However, this celebration of fashion’s opposite cannot be “radical” enough as it takes place within a certain industrial field that is regulated by rules regarding what can be done, what can be said, and how. Since the main rule is to make profit, radicality should be one way, or another administered (Bourdieu, 1996). If one’s position in the field gradually becomes more established, radicality will be tailored to fit the field’s established codes (Bourdieu and Delsaut, 1975). For instance, in a later interview when already the creative director of the much more prestigious haute-couture label Balenciaga, Demna updates the idea of “liking ugliness” vis-à-vis the original spirit of Balenciaga’s greatness. Eventually, via Balenciaga, “ugly” models showcase elegance and (unconventional) beauty:\n\nDemna: I cast real people. They have such personalities and some of them are quite the characters. They choose what they want to wear. And it’s also very Balenciaga. He used to have what people would call “ugly models”.\n\nLeon Talley: Yes, but they were elegant.\n\nDemna: They were super elegant, and he made them elegant with his clothes. People transformed when they put those dresses on. It makes sense to look for unconventional beauty at Balenciaga.\n\n(Talley and Iman, 2021)\n\nHere, the radical gesture of “liking ugliness” does not entail a subversion of the fashion system’s codes as it still plays within the key luxury signifiers of “beauty” and “elegance”. Rather, it is more of a tactical inclusion and therefore expansion of the system’s reach. This is another classic avant-garde move: the “anti-art” of Duchamp and others did not entail a rejection of art as a system; anti-art was rejecting a specific type of art (e.g., academic art) while still navigating references, display techniques, and audiences specific to the art canon. It was thus mostly a gesture of expanding the scope of the field and eventually including in the field forms, styles, media, and audiences that would (supposedly) democratize the field’s loftiness. The subsequent recognition of these avant-garde gestures by the oficial artworld and the rest of the society as genius has also to do with the prevalence of capitalism as the socioeconomic system at the time; capitalism economizes diference to create new desires and markets of which the avant-garde and later conceptual art were part. While Demna draws parallels between his practice and that of an artist (he says, “I don’t want to compare it [my work] to an artist working on an artwork—but it’s the same”, Demna quoted in Amed, 2016), this supposed democratization of fashion is explicitly modeled as business from scratch. Contrary to the anti-art practices of the 1920s that were attended by a closed circle of devotees, in today’s capitalism there is an expanded cultural market for likewise formal experiments (as also proven by Balenciaga’s enormous visibility under Demna).\n\n86\n\nCultures of Platform Capitalism","previous_page":85,"next_page":87}