Nº1 — To collect. We are happy to present the first thematic dossier of THE ICONOMIST. We explore the world of collecting and the people who do it. We look at the phenomenon of collecting from a variety of perspectives. All images in the issue were generated through artificial intelligence, as well as some texts, interviews, and short stories. The issue also includes selected texts by Susan Sontag, Emmanuel Levinas and Sergei Eisenstein. What are the limits of a collection? From garbage collectors to art collectors, from compulsive hoarders to collectors of weapons of mass destruction, the accumulators of power. The informal collectors, the professional collectors.
48 pages, 21x28cm, saddle-stitch binding, with shipping worldwide.
STAYNONSTOP is a photobook consisting of a selection of 130 images generated by artificial intelligence. The images are accompanied by fragments of artists’ texts from different sources. The name of the book comes from a reflection on how addictive these image production processes through artificial intelligence can be, like everything these days. By placing these images in confrontation with the text fragments, we try to force new readings and the creation of new contexts different from the ones used to generate the images.
138 pages, 19×19 cm, softcover and perfect-bound. Shipping worldwide.
What is THE-ICONOMIST? I imagine it as a cross between the imaginary museum proposed by André Malraux and Aby Warburg’s mnemosyne atlas adapted to a post-digital context dominated by artificial intelligence services.
Just as over a hundred years ago the ready-made drew attention to the exchange value of the work of art, the artist-ready-made also warns against the current spectacular condition of the artist. Along with the Duchampian ready-made and the Situationist detournement, it mentions Sergei Eisenstein’s montage as conflict, Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, and the appropriation strategies of pop artists and artists from the pictures generation. The ready-made is also a way of understanding its name, THE-ICONOMIST is a detournement of the name of the economics magazine founded in 1843, reimagined for a world saturated by images, using the neologism created by economist Gilson Schartz and further developed by philosopher Peter Szendy in the book The Supermarket of the Visible (2016).
In 1921, Duchamp adopted an alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and thus divided his artistic practice into two parts, sexually and ethnically. In 2021, the creator of THE-ICONOMIST went from an artist to an institution that can operate on several fronts; be a research center, a magazine, a streaming service, a collection, an archive, a portfolio of work or even an art institution.
As an artist-ready-made, then, THE-ICONOMIST exists somewhere between the split Rrose-Marcel and the multiple Deleuze-Guattari, but it is precisely its possibilities of operation that matter. Just as the ready-made is double in principle – it proposes, on the one hand, that art as a commodity is reduced to exchange value and, on the other, that its use value can be recovered (since we can still have a shovel or a bottle rack) – so the read-made artist is double in meaning. On the other hand, like THE-ICONOMIST, the artist is today more often than not “a product and a brand”, with functions that adapt to the cultural industry. The artist is considered the model of the creative type essential to the “new spirit of capitalism”. THE-ICONOMIST in its actions seeks to take advantage of the “empty center” of its ready-made and artist-as-brand status: instead of the old idea of art as a place of heroic individuation, it should become a space for the defunctionalization of subjectivities, that is, a space for refusing the scripted roles that alienate us. It should even become the place, he speculates, for a “strike” against “the sovereignty of technical and digital images in the iconomic, affective, sexual and emotional positions in which individuals are imprisoned”.