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

Platform capitalism denotes not simply a transition from one period to another but the overlapping of adjacent techniques of capital accumulation, involving the model of data extraction that brings communicational chaos and the model of curation called upon to restore order. In the next part of this book, I discuss in more detail curating in platform capitalism focusing on the particularities of three cases of curated worlds, namely high fashion, cooking, and life-coaching.

Notes

1 www.facebook.com/watch/?v=817592485885026

2 The distinction between these platform types is fluid, and there is a constant dynamic driving them toward integration. For example, infrastructural platforms seek ways to broaden their scope through sectoral connections, whereas sectoral platforms often rely on infrastructural platforms for several operations, including online visibility.

3 Van Dijck et al. further say that this ecosystem, “looks egalitarian yet is hierarchical; it is almost entirely corporate, but it appears to serve public value; it seems neutral and agnostic, but its architecture carries a particular set of ideological values; its efects appear local, while its scope and impact are global; it appears to replace ‘top-down’ ‘big government’ with ‘bottom-up’ ‘customer empowerment’, yet it is doing so by means of a highly centralized structure which remains opaque to its users” (2018: 12). Nick Srnicek (2017) makes another useful categorization of five diferent platform types, including advertising platforms (Facebook,

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Google), cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services), industrial platforms (GE), product platforms (Spotify), and lean platforms (Uber and Airbnb). Yet, while insightful, this categorization leaves less space for conceptualizing the practice of curator-users and is less useful for the research at hand.

4 In the last ten years or so the digital economy, which is the main driver of communicative capitalism, is not only developing fast but it is difused to all other sectors as digital platforms are at the top of world economy (Sadowski, 2020a). Indeed, in 2022, according to World Bank, digital economy, amounting to 15.5% of the world’s GDP, is growing two and a half times faster than the world’s GDP in the last 15 years (World Bank, 2022). This economy depends on the extraction of earth materials and the manufacturing sector mostly residing in Global South, upon which the exploitation of communication and sociality is grounded.

5 This for instance has been argued in relation to the privileging of specific narratives around COVID-19 and outlawing others in liberal capitalist democracies, for example, see Miconi, Pezzano and Risi (2023).

6 This is close to what the reflexivity theorists called “institutional reflexivity” (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994).

7 Mubi.com, accessed November 13, 2022.

8 For instance, on the Russian platform YouDo.com, the clients place an ad requesting some service and the workers bid for the job.

9 This is typical of labor in contemporary creative industries in general, such as romance fiction writers (Lois and Gregson, 2019).

References

Curating and Platforms

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Curating and Platforms

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Part 2
Cultures of Platform
Capitalism

Taylor & Francis

4 Cool Is in the Air Atmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital Warhol Economies

4.1 The Banal Luxury Complex

In 2019, the British art and fashion magazine HERO staged an interview between the superstar curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the “artist, model, and musician” Eliza Douglas (Douglas quoted in HERO, 2019).1 The editorial text describes Douglas as a “modern muse”, who is additionally the “partner, collaborator, and star” of the prolific artist Anne Imhof, winner of—among other prizes—the prestigious Golden Lion for representing Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2017. The interview deals with Douglas’ “burgeoning portfolio of work, her collaborations with Imhof and modeling for Balenciaga”, that is, Douglas’ sprawling career crossovers in just a few years, ranging from high art to high fashion and everything in between. Douglas is a recognizable figure to global art world trotters for her distinguished androgynous, ofbeat, and clumsily elegant physique, which she showcases as a performer in Imhof’s dark and loosely choreographed compositions, commenting on youth cultures and nihilistic consumerism. Douglas’ all-round, cross-disciplinary subcultural capital conveys a sophisticated coolness, reminiscent of that of Edie Sedgwick in the Andy Warhol milieus in New York (Thornton, 1996). Apart from modeling for the high-end luxury brand Balenciaga, Douglas has also collaborated with the ofbeat luxury fashion brand Vetements, which brings Eastern European and “gopnik” styles to the global catwalk.2 Douglas’ persona has been promoted in the fashion world by the founder of Vetements and, at the time of writing, the artistic director of Balenciaga, the Georgianborn and Belgium-educated Demna Gvasalia, labeled as “wunderkind” and “fashion’s biggest trickster” (Conlon, 2018; Serio, 2022). Demna, who was in the Time magazine’s top-100 most influential people in 2022, popularized Douglas’ physique among high-fashion milieus, from the Vetements’ idiosyncratic fashion statements to the classy Balenciaga haute couture. For Demna, Marcel Duchamp is one of the main reference points (“I have discovered Duchamp by discovering myself in a way as designer, because it explains to me how I work”, Gvasalia quoted in Hargrove, 2019). The anti-fashion ethos of Demna mirrors Duchamp’s anti-art, transforming everyday items into notoriously expensive luxury fashion via a transgressive, controversial, and cool aesthetic that we can call “banal luxury”.3

DOI: 10.4324/9781003182801-6

Douglas is just one of countless transnational actors, aspiring or accomplished, in the neoliberal cultural industries, who wander around diverse creative fields and inhabit the incessant blurring of disciplines, professional identities, and the borders between high and low. This chapter looks at the productive aspect of this crisscrossing and, in particular, the eclectic interweaving between classic avant-garde strategies and commercial fashion design in banal luxury; banal luxury “artifies” fashion via the legacy of conceptual art and is thus key for disseminating the curatorial apparatus in both highbrow milieus (e.g., traditional fashion consumers) as well as ordinary internet users (e.g., via platform sharing). The references to Obrist, Douglas, Imhof, and Demna are cursors to a metropolitan, transnational, and conceptual high-end culture, which transports the mass aesthetic to high-end cultural production—a gesture reminiscent of milieus around Duchamp and Warhol. This scene inhabits physical spaces, that is biennials, openings, and fashion shows as well as online platform connectivities, including posts, stories, tags, check-ins, memes, and other relational practices (van Dijck, 2013). Similar to how the historical avant-garde, like Dadaism and Surrealism, became part of the mainstream via curators-mediators in the 1960s and the 1970s, banal luxury, as an anti-fashion gesture, needs to be curated in order to attain legibility and value.

The banal luxury complex inhabits interdisciplinary creative scenes varying from art and fashion to music and dining. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that a similar interdisciplinary interweaving was the strongest economic asset of post-1990s New York, which she calls the “Warhol Economy” (2020). Owing its legacy to Andy Warhol, the visionary who mingled the avantgarde, the countercultural, and the mainstream around event socializations in his studio the Factory, the Warhol Economy harvests continuous cool atmospheres across networks of creativity. Currid-Halkett’s concept is celebratory, similar to that of early creative economy enthusiasts like Richard Florida, overlooking issues around artistic exploitation, precarity, and ideology (Zukin, 2020; de Peuter, 2014), yet useful as a descriptive tool for the purpose of this chapter. Insofar as banal luxury is stylistically the reverse of exceptional luxury, it shapes countercultural and symbolically rich atmospheres that are nevertheless economically productive. To illustrate this with an example, let us look at the productivity of banal luxury in a promotional event that the fashion brand Burberry staged in September 2020 as a homage to Imhof. This event, according to one of its reviews, curated a “cosmopolitan” and “international” selection of “stars”, including Douglas who performed some of her tracks “exclusively for #Burberry ahead of the Spring/Summer 2021 show” (Bruno, 2021). These songs adopted a Sonic Youth-like, “dirty” distortion guitar and looped, coarse vocals with Douglas simulating a later-generation Kim Gordon.4 Burberry celebrated “the artist’s freedom of expression” (Bruno, 2021), linking the concept of freedom to a musical underground style as part of the brand’s identity. Here, capital produces a simulation of the underground that crisscrosses contemporary art, grunge aesthetics, stylized photography, and sophisticated fashion so that creative networks coalesce and flow across the brand. The performance curates Burberry as a daring, edgy, and cool brand in the overarching context of “cool capitalism” (McGuigan, 2015).5

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As the pop icon Kim Kardashian says in her capacity as brand ambassador for Balenciaga, “When I wear clothes designed by Demna, I feel cool. I feel no matter what I wear, it’s going to be all right, because he designed it and he’s the coolest” (quoted in Friedman, 2021). The concept of “cool” in marketing literature is usually associated with mass consumerism (e.g., Levi’s jeans), rather than with the exclusivity and sophistication of highend fashion. Yet, I will argue that the aesthetic posture of coolness is precisely what runs through banal luxury networks in platform economies. Via “cool”, the signifier “luxury fashion” undergoes a subcultural artification that expands milieus of audiences and buyers. Coolness involves recurring traits that have dominated the post-war youth subcultures to varying degrees, such as narcissism, ironic detachment, and hedonism (Pountain and Robins, 2000; McGuigan, 2015: 4).6 Cool is a “permanent state of private rebellion”, a defiant state of not showing too much emotion, not becoming too clingy, not pressuring, not demanding but keeping loose, independent, decent, and distant (Pountain and Robins, 2000: 19). In banal luxury, these mannerisms are packaged in an atmosphere of sophistication, that is an overall cultivation, an informed outlook and the ability to make conceptual associations.7

In this chapter, I explore the figures of Demna and the Vetements-Balenciaga complex as they are a remarkable link between the historiographies of antiart, the avant-garde, and the curatorial, on the one hand, and the commercial world of fashion and high-end creative industries on the other. I therefore focus on selected exemplary expressions of banal luxury without exhaustively analyzing Vetements’ and Balenciaga’s history or Demna’s career. This chapter aims to bridge contemporary artworld and high-end culture before delving into less exclusive platform practices, like cooking, coaching, and flirting. In the first section, I discuss the idea of Warhol Economies as networks that rely on the appropriation of subcultural, underground, and countercultural trends forming dialogues within middle- or higher-class milieus. If the concept of the Warhol Economy “is the sociality of the Factory enacted on the scale of New York City” (de Peuter, 2014: 31), then I will here expand the concept, arguing that, instead of merely New York, it encompasses translocal creative milieus that sprawl in diverse sites, online and ofline, interweaving art, music, business, fashion, entrepreneurialism, and market-based transactions. Later, I look at the persona of Demna, who crafts a populist, controversial, and sophisticated genius in the tradition of Andy Warhol and embraces “ugly” fashion aesthetics. Next, I look at the use of the selfie in the Vetements Instagram accounts and the poor chic in apparel designs, such as the Okhrana Uniform and the Paris Sneakers of Vetements and Balenciaga respectively. I argue that banal luxury ofers a unique case of the curating economy as it updates the traditional avant-garde gestures of Duchamp and Warhol in the age of platforms, borrowing from the latter’s language of connectivity (see Figure 4.1).

Atmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital Warhol Economies

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