24 April 2009: "Do the offices of the popular alt record label DIM MAK also serve as a porn studio?"

This post is about Immanuel Kant. In contemplating the connections between contemporary avant-garde popular music (that peculiar oxymoronic conundrum), Carles implicitly questions whether it is possible for a truly disinterested aesthetic can exist, or if the Kantian ideal is an outmoded fantasy from a predominantly precapitalist epoch.

Carles begins by tracing the trajectory of a fringe record lable that had become seized upon for its value in signifying an supposed exemption from the common run of society.

Yall might know the record label DIM MAK as the record label that was started by popular blog house DJ Steve Aoki. It has developed into a lifestyle brand, and they sell records, bangers, trinkets, t-shirts, and probably other stuff.

A combination for the making of art quickly dissolves into a commercial venture for the marketing of status signifiers. The presumption that the music could exist as a ding-an-sich seems to shrivel in the face of the freezing blast of capitalist entrepreneurship. The profit potential in art as cultural capital and as traded commodity are always already inherent in the conception of form, and constitute the matrix, the ground, from which artistic impulse now blossom, as so many weeds from the dung of laconic farm animals.

Carles then refigures this trajectory as the fall from art to pornography, the prostitution of beauty, and worse, the way this descent is inscribed on the subject/consumer: "Yalll…. s00 confused. Is the record industry dying? Do rcrdlbls start having to ‘do porn’ now?... Do yall like porn with alternative story lines, or do u just want 2 see ppl ‘cumming’ on 1another? Feel sad that I am ‘more excited’ about Dim Mak porn than Dim Mak music." The capitalistic imperative in the creation of art circumscribes the potential responsiveness of the viewer, rendered structurally in the aesthetic exchange into a passive consumer, Carles daringly posits, trapped in a prison of instrumentalism. Interestingly, he also demonstrates the terrible epidemiology of this debased relationship to art by referring his readers to the pornographic video, thus instantiating the process in a single gesture.

Is there an "alternative" to an aesthetic intimately bound up with interest? Or is every effort to bring art to an audience bound to be caught up with "viral marketing" practices? Perhaps a masturbatory response to art is the best way of severing the epistemological knot: As Kant would say, "we can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the respect in which I depend on the object's existence." As Carles would say, "Damn."