Joe Scanlan

I want my art to have an air of independence and mobility, even when it's in a museum. If art must admit that it is just another part of a totalizing consumer society, then its only access to cultural power is to engage that society. To cite another person I included in Pay For Your Pleasure (reprise), Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth: "I was sort of raised all my life to do art . . . I just felt like I should be doing music." It seemed to me that this was really the next step after Pop Art, you see, entering directly into a popular form of culture instead of commenting on it. It’s about circulating new ideas for consumption. It’s about trying to change the direction, or flow, of the political economy of art, trying to design things that begin as art and can flow out into the world as well as end up as art in a museum.
In some ways I find entrepreneurialism more dynamic and patient than art. These days art pretty much runs on a art fair cycle. But even the most conservative venture capitalist will give an idea five years to pan out. So in that way capitalism can be more accommodating of risk and contingency and loss than art is. Capitalism takes such risks as a matter of course -- indeed, as a matter of survival. Joseph Schumpeter said as much in his analysis of business cycles and his concept of Creative Destruction, which is pretty much the capitalist equivalent to the avant garde.

Julian Heynen, WINDOW SHOPPING. A conversation between Julian Heynen and Joe Scanlan; in: Joe Scanlan, Passing Through, Düsseldorf, 2007, p. 95