On The Libidinal Economy of Artists
Artists are both ruthlessly independent in one way, and rather dependent on another more ground level way, that is characterized in attachment styles that resemble the process that keeps them so involved in making their artwork in the first place.
It is a paradox at the level of the Ego, to be so libidinally engaged with ones productions is a drive for independent creation, soul independence, but the attachment to the work is one of not letting go.
Also, artworks as such are not commercial until they enter a very rarified niche, this is the niche economy of the artworld, but even once their have to have a subjective, personal way of entering into circulation that is essentially at odds with trade their products existence, their artworks ontology, is bound up and embude with a narcissistic component of the individual, an individual not fully detached from early libidinal investments. Now this narcissistic component can also, and indeed is precisely what speaks to people, speaks to viewers at a universal level: this access to someone’s private world, that is how art can have some of the divine to it, because the particularity can effect the global and universal without leaving the specificity of the individuals vision. Art, if it’s good, really can connect disparate people, but it’s only because the art product itself is severely attached, to a primordial womb we could say.
Now there is plenty of art simply made for the art market, but those kind of people generally won’t come to me, and there are some psychoanalysts out there who will get the joke about what that says about them — that they are perverse because their art is not coming from a genuine place of the drives, but of one where they are crafting things into an asimilable form, a market form.
Authentic artworks are not readily absorbed into an economy, unless and until they are absorbed by the art world, which happens to be a very specific commercial economy that caters to their libidinal dependence while applauding their entrepreneurial independence, but not every artist figures out or falls into the specific symbolic register of the artworld, it’s institutional reality.
