Obedient clients

Abstract

This article analyzes the transformations of the social functions of art, focusing on the transition from modern autonomy to the contemporary “transesthetic era.” Drawing on Gilles Lipovetsky, Jean Serroy, and Jonathan Crary, it discusses the absorption of art into market logic and the dynamics of the “internet complex.” It investigates how this infrastructure of power reconfigures sensory experience through regimes of permanent visibility and the weakening of historical memory. In this context, the artist is caught between critical potential and the self-management of the self as a brand (branding), becoming an “obedient client” of algorithmic curation. The work incorporates the perspectives of Moacir dos Anjos and Alessandra Simões Paiva to reflect on the nationalization of local discourses and the financialization of aesthetics within the colonial world-system. It concludes that, given the impossibility of a radical exteriority to capitalism, the political potency of art lies in acting from within the system. Through the concept of opacity (Édouard Glissant), the article proposes a form of resistance that tensions the totalizing transparency of the market, preserving the density of experience and the deceleration of informational flows.