Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 87

THE SCALES, POLITICS, AND POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF CONTEMPORARY ART BIENNIALS
and mechanisms of capital accumulation is Panos Kompatsiaris. He highlights that the
proliferation of biennials has to be examined in the context of post-Fordist processes of
capital accumulation. While the extraction of surplus value was tied to the production
site under Fordism, in post-Fordism its extraction becomes diffused in the sphere of the
circulation of capital in the financial, touristic, and cultural sectors—“the seeking of val-
orization in collective desire ... has been capital’s response to the problem of growth”
(Kompatsiaris 2014:81; see also de Duve 2007:682, Sheikh 2010 [2009]:155).
Monica Sassatelli’s work provides a counter argument to claims of the logic of com-
modification dominating biennials. Sassatelli has pointed out that analyzing biennials
in terms of the logic of commodification is reductionist in the sense of, firstly, hiding the
specificities of symbolic production and, secondly, positing economic value and value
of art as “hostile worlds” (Sassatelli 2016a:4). Instead, Sassatelli promotes an analysis of
biennials in terms of the “symbolic production of art”. This approach is able to take into
account questions of value production without explaining everything away using the
logic of commodification. The notion of the “symbolic production of art” stands for the
process of valuation rendering a work, an artist, or a genre relevant and appreciated. In
this capacity, biennials mediate between “the constitution of aesthetic dispositions and
the legitimation of regimes of meaning and value” (Sassatelli 2016a:3; see also O’Neill
2012:72). In terms of politics of space, an analysis of the symbolic production of art
could imply keeping a closer eye on ongoing struggles and searches for new rationales
for what is actually valued and what is not (cf. Sassatelli 2016a:13).
Conclusions
In this review article, we have reflected on the world politics of contemporary art bienni-
als. Three key dimensions emerged from our analysis: scale, politics, and value. Scale re-
fers to the sociospatial ordering of biennials. Politics stands for the question of whether
biennials reproduce or challenge existing power relations, and value refers to the ways in
which not only economic but also symbolic capital is produced in and through biennials.
Analyzing scholarly articles on biennials, we have shown that a significant amount of
practices of and academic discussion on biennials takes place around the question of
scale. Scholars writing about biennials often depart from the relevance of nations and
national representation and propose alternatives to it. There is, indeed, a productive ten-
sion between the order of nation states and its alternatives—the global, local, or glo-
cal—within biennial practices as well as in commentaries on them. There are also sug-
gestions that such relational notions as heterotopia or assemblage would best capture
the spatiality of biennials. This shows that a variety of sociospatial orderings matter for
the politics of contemporary art biennials. Multiple spatialities and scales are relevant in
order to understand the politics of space of contemporary art biennials. There is no need
to privilege any of them but rather to pay attention to their co-implication, e.g. to the way
in which they intersect and influence each other.
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