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# Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

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4.2 Warhol Economies and Cool Atmospheres

The readymade and its experimental, anti-art, and anti-commercial ethos found its commodified apotheosis in the activities of Andy Warhol and the milieus around him in post-1960s New York. Warhol’s “business art” overtly emphasized that when it comes to creating art, what primarily matters is the creation of the context (Currid-Hackett, 2020: Ch. 1). These contexts spanned creative disciplines joining diferent practitioners under a seemingly loose atmosphere of narcissistic transgression, which was the backdrop of experiencing objects, performances, and other activities in the Factory sociality. With Warhol and the milieus around him, art decisively abandoned handcraft in favor of an extended socio-economic practice, which is a business enterprise where the boundaries between making art and making money are blurred.8 The artist here is pushed to assume the role of a creative entrepreneur insofar as innovative ideas are a prerequisite for artistic success. With the widespread institutionalization and dissemination of conceptual art strategies since the 1990s, as we saw in Chapter 2, this paradigm has become canonical in creative fields globally; the mandate to be in the right place and to know the right people across networks and flows of art, money, and parties shapes the role model of creative subjects (Lorey, 2014; McRobbie, 2018). With the catalyzing influence of social media, this mandate spreads as a desirable life model pretty much everywhere, not just for those in the art world (Mould, 2020).

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In her celebratory account of urban coolness, Currid-Halkett defines the cultural economy of New York as the Warhol Economy (2020), where an informal web of parties, art openings, punk musicians, fashion designers, hip bars, jazz clubs, restaurants, cool spaces, music venues, and underground art compose the city’s “perpetual creativity” (2020: Ch. 1). As we saw with the Burberry partnership, this cross-sectoral, informal sociality suggests that “fashion, art, film, music, and design did not reside in separate spheres”, but are in the process of movement and exchange (2020: Ch. 1). Avant-garde artists mingle with eclectic fashion designers and underground musicians in urban clusters of chic bars, fusion restaurants, boutique cofee shops, and organic markets. This perpetual creativity should then be thought of in terms of networks and processes, rather than objects and persons. Similar to Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (2010), in the Warhol Economy, art objects, subjects, performances, and events are actants within a network mediating its longevity in varying capacities, intensities, and degrees.9

In this sense, and since a network is always more than the sum of its parts, the Warhol Economy gives rise to an intangible context which defines the emotive hint of a space, an atmosphere. The concept of the atmosphere, traditionally associated with the meteorological field, owes most of its relevance in contemporary theory to the seminal work of the philosopher Gernot Böhme (2013, 2016). The atmosphere, for Böhme, encompasses the intangible surroundings, barely perceptible and often neglected, framing one’s presence and action: an atmosphere is the “moods which are ‘in the air’ ” providing the “emotional tinge of a space” (2013: 1). Diferent emotional tinges construct diferent afects and dispositions when navigating a space. The atmosphere surrounding a hospital’s waiting room, for instance, crafts an emotional tinge that usually communicates sadness or psychological distress, while the atmosphere in a comedy show enables laughter. Atmospheres have certain characters, and the character of each informs “the way in which it communicates a feeling to us as participating subjects” (2013: 2); if it rains or it is windy, the atmosphere is often gloomy, if it is sunny and the smells are nice the atmosphere is pleasant. Atmospheres thus qualify afects and emotional responses: if one laughs in an environment of psychological distress that would be perceived as inappropriate while if one laughs in a comedy show it would not. There can be something theatrical about an atmosphere, as if objects, subjects, and activities occur on a stage. An atmosphere is neither material nor immaterial, neither perceptible nor imperceptible; as its etymological origin suggests, it is a sphere of vapor (atmos [ατμός] in Greek), a state of in-betweenness, among, and within. Atmospheres often refer to the tacit level, being “there but not there, imperceptible yet all-determining” (Bille, Bjerregaard and Sørensen, 2015; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2013: 36), neither objective nor subjective, they are “what is in between, what mediates the two sides” (Böhme, 2016: 13). The atmosphere of the Warhol Economy conveys a cool ambience, that is, it is an imperceptible surrounding within which subjects, objects, and events are shaped by, and themselves perform, a condition of desirability; a space—physical or virtual—that appeals through ironic detachment, narcissism, and some (minor and managed) deviation from the norm, a “symbolic rebellion” (Puntain and Robins, 2000:15).

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Symbolic rebellions are registered as such insofar as transgressive, underground, radical, or subcultural trends manage to, one way or another, intervene in the dominant lexicon of a creative field (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2018; McGuigan, 2015; Currid-Halkett, 2020). Such rebellions typically happen on behalf of middle- or high-class milieus, a process which has been notably termed as “radical chic” (Wolfe, 1970). The managed accommodation of aesthetically, politically, or socially radical postures is a way to insert managed dissent or friction into the network’s atmosphere. In terms of contemporary creative industries, such radical postures, for example, may refer to previously frowned upon or ignored art practices, such as the Duchampian readymade, subcultural musical styles such as punk, online communities such as gamers, or political actors such as revolutionaries (Kompatsiaris, 2017; Ciotti, 2020). As the managed accommodation of transgression makes a network look cool, we can argue, like Jim McGuigan, that cool capitalism is the “incorporation of disafection into capitalism itself” yet add that it is not simply disafection with capitalism but the deviation from any authority that mediates coolness (McGuigan, 2015: 1). Deviation, though, whether more or less politically and aesthetically radical, has to be curated, that is, packaged in narratives that would satisfy specific creative stakeholders, audiences, and milieus.

Let us give an example of how a high-end art milieu curated its atmosphere through the ordinary practice of simply describing artworks. The 9th Athens Biennale (titled Eclipse) that took place in 2021 included in its program a film installation by the British artist and film director Steve McQueen titled End Credits. This installation was devoted to the Afroamerican baritone singer, athlete, and committed communist Paul Robeson, highlighting his persecution by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a result of his political activities. While Robeson was a revolutionary and a hardline communist, a fact that resulted in the FBI taking his passport for years and in efect destroying his life and career, in the biennial webpage he was portrayed as a “social activist […] blacklisted […] due to his struggle against racism”.10 This is, however, a customization of Robeson’s life that suits the biennial’s largely anti-communist stakeholders.11 This case shows a way to curate an element within a cool atmosphere, that is, to publicly edit out, select, and eventually distort the biographical details of someone like Paul Robeson so that the visitors, funders, and stakeholders see what they feel better seeing. Robeson appeared as a simple activist instead of a communist party member with strong ties to the Soviet Union (who even wrote paeans to Stalin). The curators of Eclipse, as key actors in the transnational Warhol Economy networks of Athens, curated a state of “controlled transgression” (“black but not communist”) performing and shaping the predispositions of its audiences and stakeholders.

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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.

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4.3 “It Is Ugly, That’s Why We Like It”, or Privileged Populism in High Fashion

In the next sections, I look at atmosphere of banal luxury, in particular those around Demna, Vetements, and Balenciaga. In this section, I focus on Demna’s privileged populism and continue with selfies and the poor chic in the performances of these brands. In all cases, a feeling of “banal” is acted upon luxury; banal refers not only to an object or gesture of bad taste but also to the ordinary, the tedious, and the uninspiring, which when purposefully performed upon luxury atmospheres appears as a subversive gesture. I also understand the banal as a notion that comes into efect within the contexts articulated, so in luxury fashion banal implies the common and the everyday as opposed to the elegance, privilege, and uniqueness that luxury ofers access to. The atmospheres of banal luxury I look at bridge a continuum between physical spaces, such as fashion events, and online spaces, such as interviews, clips, posts, and reels. Here and in the next sections, I follow selective moments of the banal luxury complex, including Instagram accounts (@ vetements\_oficial and @balenciaga @demnagram), interviews, fashion items, and public interactions. The interview format, for example, which we saw with Douglas, creates a stage where one can appear as radical, controversial, prophetic, and so on in the context of what Gernot Böhme calls “performance society” (2017: 17). Yet, to go back to Bourdieu, performances are subject to the rules of the field and the positions one is speaking from rather than free-floating exercises (1997). I regard the material, for instance, that I use from Demna’s interviews in this section as a linguistic performance specific to the luxury fashion field and the subfield that Demna navigates instead of a free-floating exercise in self-making; in luxury fashion, as in any other field, there is a struggle among the field’s players for defining dominant concepts, discourses, and values (Bourdieu, 2020; Bartlett, Cole, and Rocamora, 2018). Demna is part of “the post-Soviet fashion” scene (Bugajska, 2020; Simpson, 2021), which is a subfield of luxury fashion credited for queering the masculine body (Roberts, 2019), and whose other representatives include fashion designers Gosha Rubchinskiy and Lotta Volkova. Post-Soviet fashion channeled an excessive fashion style of “ugly” streetwear aesthetics and a conceptual remodeling of digital culture to global fashion, which Demna inherits and performs in the luxury fashion world.

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Demna is the co-founder of the luxury clothing brand Vetements, and he was its head designer from 2014 to 2019.13 In 2019, he left the brand to focus on his role as creative director of the prestigious Paris-based haute-couture brand, Balenciaga, which hired him in 2015. During these four years, Demna held a position in both brands—for Demna Vetements and Balenciaga are “two diferent, independent stories that happen to share one common factor, which is me” (Demna quoted in SSENSE, 2016). Vetements launched a symbolic revolt against the established fashion system by unashamedly embracing cheap popular culture, something risky for a brand positioning itself as luxury. Vetements collaborated with low-end companies, such as DHL, IKEA, Reebok, and even Crocs, and occasionally chose equally banal venues for their shows, including a McDonald’s restaurant and a cheap Chinese restaurant in Paris. These synergies were controversial insofar as they challenged the exclusiveness of the luxury fashion system, yet they made the brand look confidently cool in its undertakings. The scandalousness of these collaborations gained extensive media coverage from major media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Guardian, and Vogue, among many others. As the scandalous provocation is a classic avant-garde tactic for drawing public attention, the charismatic figure of Demna proved key in attracting media publicity.

While luxury fashion designers have likewise embraced avant-garde tactics, including banality and ugliness before, Vetements under the direction of Demna (and after 2019 of his brother, Guram Gvasalia), pushed this idea to its limits. Tellingly, when asked about one of Vetements items, Demna stated in 2016 at the height of Vetements success that “it’s ugly, that’s why we like it” (Demna quoted in Wolf, 2016). This avowal reverses a commonsense truism of the fashion system, that is, that fashion is about beauty, through an unapologetic celebration of its exact opposite. As Duchamp vocally disassociates art from the burden of handcraft or beauty by exhibiting a prefabricated and banal bicycle wheel, the love of ugliness here has a similar efect vis-à-vis luxury fashion: it strips it from its raison d’etre. The timing for Demna was more ideal than Duchamp, however, as Demna’s endorsement of unorthodox aesthetics resonated with the body positivity movement that entered fashion and culture at large at least after the 2010s while Duchamp’s practices were only institutionalized in the art system in the 1960s and 1970s (partly via the symbolic and economic capital associated with Warhol), that is, more than 50 years after their initial appearance.

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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:

Demna: 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”.

Leon Talley: Yes, but they were elegant.

Demna: 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.

(Talley and Iman, 2021)

Here, 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).

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In banal luxury, the rhetoric toward the democratization of fashion (via celebrating ugliness or unconventional beauty) often flirts with a larger populist rhetoric, which praises the ordinary and subaltern versus the elite. Populism is a discursive construction that “interpellates citizens as members of ‘the people’, considered as an underdog, and opposed along a vertical down/up axis to ‘the elite’, conceived as a small and illegitimately powerful and privileged group” (De Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2020: 316). In populist discourse, there is an often-rhetorical celebration of the masses that are superior than the elites. Demna appropriates elements from the underdog classes in the expensive clothes he designs, as we shall see later, but also employs similar tactics, applauding the subaltern classes for being real and authentic in contrast to the self-righteous elites:

A lot of people who don’t have money and who don’t have the possibility to buy designer clothes—they have much more understanding of style than the elite.

(Zahm, 2022, emphasis added)

And

When you have too much money, you lose that sense of style because you don’t have to be creative anymore. You can buy your identity by buying the brand, by buying a watch, a diamond, whatever. And when you don’t have [money], when you have to be creative with a roll of toilet paper, that’s when you really can make something new.

(Zahm, 2022, emphasis added)

The people here have presumably grown superior taste over the elites who have become complacently conformist as a result of their material abundance. The strategic use of underdog identities in order to reinforce one’s authority as expert resembles what De Benjamin De Cleen and Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado call “populism of the privileged” (2023). Given that it comes from the creative director of one of the most expensive fashion brands in the world and maybe the most visible fashion superstar at the time, this rhetorical style reverses the commonsense hierarchy of taste and at the same time continues addressing the elites (the 1%, the people who can aford, say a Balenciaga dog bowl for \$900, see Pauly, 2022). That is, the luxury fashion designer credits the dressing capacities of the masses and discredits that of the elites yet at the same time attempts to appeal exclusively to the privileged latter. This assumed “friction” in the system, or “crisis” in De Cleen and Casado’s terms (2023), does several things at once: it enables system reflexivity and therefore expansion, as the high fashion participants are encouraged to question their lifestyles and choices, as well as announcing Demna as a culturally omnivorous expert who navigates with remarkable ease both highend and low-end clothing styles (Savage, 2006). This crossover throughout genres is persistent in several of Demna’s creative expressions; for instance, his curated playlist for Apple Music “Hello, My Name is Demna” resembles a Greatest Hits album of global pop/rock, with songs of Kayne West, Marilyn Manson, Garbage, Muse, and Rammstein spiced up with more internationally obscure Russian and Georgian music related to Demna’s growing up.

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The perception of Demna as a culturally omnivorous expert is boosted by Demna’s own autobiographical details, including his upbringing in Soviet Georgia and his experience of communism:

Up until 1991, Georgia was part of the ex-Soviet Union, so I had a Soviet childhood. I was brought up with Stalinist, Leninist, and, Communist ideas and deprived of any kind of real information.

(Demna quoted in SSENSE, 2016, emphasis added)

In a statement that can be easily accommodated in the milieus of creative industries, similarly to the Athens Biennale, the “Soviet childhood” and communist ideas here are blamed for depriving Demna of true information. Yet, at the same time, these conditions shaped his vision as a designer; for instance, the embracing of military aesthetics and police uniforms in his design practices are justified by his experience of war and life in the Soviet Union. Or, for instance, the “scandalous” late 2022 mud runaway designed by the artist Santiago Sierra at Balenciaga’s show in Paris Fashion Week, who Demna recruited because he is an artist “against capitalism”, was a metaphor “for digging for truth and being down to earth” (Demna quoted in Spiegler, 2022). A harsh childhood and the distinct upbringing endow the designer with a rare, penetrating vision, which binds him with a responsibility to be authentic to his experience:

I feel like my challenge and responsibility as a designer today is to question what beauty is. Why do we follow the rules from 50 years ago? I didn’t grow up in Versailles. I am a refugee. I needed to look for beauty in everything. Cristóbal [Balenciaga] did that when everybody was doing fitted silhouettes and he did what they called a “potato bag.” The most minimal thing. He was the father of minimalism in some ways. I read an article in an issue of French Vogue from the 1960s, and they ridiculed it and said it was ugly, and I suddenly felt so good, because I realized that when you want to do something like this, you always have to sufer not being understood right away. I went through that, too, and it gave me hope.

(Demna quoted in Talley and Iman, 2021, emphasis added)

Demna’s creative practice is here a calling that somehow appears consistent with Cristóbal Balenciaga’s original vision. By partaking in the authority of Cristóbal Balenciaga, Demna occupies the figure of the misfit who eventually made it to the top, a genius who, despite misfortunes and sufering, went from rags to riches.

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Demna’s persona is also performed via Balenciaga’s Instagram account (14.3 million followers) and the Instagram account @demnagram, an account controlled by the fashion enthusiast Saba Bakhia, a “Demna supporter”, and in turn “supported by Balenciaga” (that is by Demna himself). Balenciaga and Bakhia are platform curators, insofar as they organize the representations of the brand and of Demna in Instagram (insofar as Demna is the public face of Balenciaga). The Balenciaga account has the unorthodox strategy of updating all its content in each new collection (instead of preserving previous posts in its timeline) so as to highlight each new collection for a certain period of time. In its permanent stories section, it promotes activist causes, such as the women’s movement in Iran or the Ukrainian war eforts, while this activism extends to incidents, among others, such as Balenciaga leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk became the owner of the platform, Demna dropping his long-term collaborator and buddy Ye (Kayne West) after the latter made a racist statement against Jewish people and Demna calling for the US citizens to vote for Biden in the American elections of 2020. The @demnagram account performs a diferent side of Demna: apart from photos related to his design, it regularly features inspirational quotes attributed to Demna. For instance, in the description of a post on Balenciaga sneakers there is Demna saying, “do not listen to anyone telling you what to do and how to do it. The only thing, you should listen to is your heart, it will always bring you to right places in life” (Demna quoted in demnagram, 2022a) or “I don’t like that luxury is always intended to communicate that you’re rich […] I’d rather wear a bag that doesn’t make me look like the rare bourgeois bitch who can aford it” (Demna quoted in demnagram, 2022b). These inspirational quotes register the luxury designer as a guru or life coach (about which we will see in more detail in Chapter 6), crafting a persona that spreads over pretty much anything that is associated with neoliberal creativity today. In the next section, I turn to another instance of banal luxury, which is the Vetements Instagram account and in particular the use of selfies.

4.4 Highbrow Selfies in Vetements Instagram

Vetements, similar to Balenciaga, except even more defiantly as a result of its explicit orientation toward youth cultures, stages Instagram atmospheres that are cool, revolting, and transgressive. The brand excessively deploys internet meme aesthetics and, as per Demna’s spirit, reverses common perceptions of beauty and elegance in luxury fashion (Skjulstad, 2020; 2021). The Instagram activity of Vetements taps into platform connectivity, inviting “audiences to participative action, tweaking, DIY practices, controversy and debate as part of the brand’s persuasive techniques for agenda setting, thus situating itself in the center of discursive activity” (Skjulstad, 2020: 188). For instance, prior to launching an online “secret project” in July 2021, Vetements published a post in their @vetements\_uncensored calling their followers to “Join Now or Fuck Of”. This not only transgresses the customer-oriented paradigm, in which customers are treated with respect, but it turns to its complete opposite by telling them to “fuck of”. Via such daily managed controversies, the fashion design collective taps into internet cultures and meme logics, with hilarity and transgression being encoded in their digital mediations (also often into their garments and apparel).

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