the inescapable market: on art and exchange

lately i've been obsessed with this question that feels both stupid and profound: can anything i make exist outside systems of exchange? not just money exchange, but ANY kind of energy transfer or social positioning. and underneath that, i'm really asking: can i ever be truly authentic? i started thinking about this while working on speculative design projects that are supposed to question the future, only to realize that even the most radical stuff just ends up in exhibits, websites, and academic convos.

it feels like a total trap. if i create something and keep it private, it just sits there alone without any dialogue or friction. if i share it, boom. it instantly enters various markets: attention markets, cultural capital markets, actual money markets. if i try to make something deliberately anti commercial? that BECOMES its selling point. if i refuse to participate altogether? that refusal becomes my brand. there's no outside to this system. even the thought in my brain needs glucose to fuel it. creation never escapes basic thermodynamics. energy has to transfer and transform. so is meaning itself just inseparable from market dynamics?

adorno nailed this despair when he wrote there's "no right life in the wrong life." if our entire reality is structured by market logic, maybe authentic expression is literally impossible. pretty depressing to think our most personal creative impulses are serving purposes beyond what we intend. i think about bataille, who saw that all living systems generate excess energy that has to be spent. unlike economists focused on production and utility, bataille recognized that societies channel surplus through various forms of "expenditure." some productive (investment, growth) and others gloriously useless (art, sex, luxury, sacrifice). these useless expenditures might represent moments where we break with market logic.

but even that doesn't free us. the market LOVES absorbing these ruptures and turning transgression into commodity. deleuze and guattari described how capitalism constantly "deterritorializes" creative forces, setting them free only to "reterritorialized" them as products. our escape routes always lead back to capture.

i look at artists who've fought this paradox. Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock every hour for a year, turning his existence into art while producing almost nothing sellable. Lee Lozano's "dropout piece" was literally just her completely withdrawing from the art world. On Kawara made minimal date paintings and telegrams saying "i am still alive." David Hammons sold snowballs on the street in winter that would inevitably melt.

but here's the thing. i know about these works PRECISELY because they've been documented and absorbed into art history. the very examples i use to show resistance to the market have been captured by it. even emily dickinson, who wrote without seeking publication, has had her private creative energy turned into cultural capital.

the trap feels complete. create and share: be captured by the market. create and hide: remain isolated. refuse to create: define yourself through that refusal, another form of positioning. and underneath all this is the realization that authenticity itself has become commodified. "finding your authentic voice" is now marketing language. authenticity is just another brand value to leverage.

this isn't just abstract stuff. it shows up as real anxiety when making creative work. why make this instead of that? who will see it? how will it be received? these questions infiltrate the creative process itself, making pure expression seem impossible. the market isn't just where art goes AFTER creation. it shapes the imagination that creates it.

this creates an authenticity paradox: trying consciously to be authentic makes you inauthentic. when we deliberately try to be authentic, we end up performing authenticity according to recognized scripts. true authenticity seems to require unselfconsciousness that's impossible once we're aware of these dynamics. yet ignoring them means being unconsciously shaped by them. either way, pursuing authenticity leads back into systems of exchange and valuation.

maybe this is why so many artists have turned to process over product, ephemeral works, or deliberate smallness. not as a solution (there isn't one) but as friction against the frictionless circulation of commodities. mark fisher suggested certain aesthetic experiences might temporarily pierce "capitalist realism" that makes alternatives unimaginable.

i wonder if just acknowledging this trap might create a small freedom within it. not freedom FROM the market, that's probably impossible, but freedom to move more consciously within its constraints. fred moten and stefano harney's concept of "the undercommons" suggests spaces of collaboration that don't completely escape capture but create moments of possibility within it.

so maybe the question shifts from "how do i escape the market?" to "how do i create with full awareness of these dynamics?" this doesn't solve the tension, but might allow for a more honest creative practice. agamben's idea of "inoperativity" (action that refuses productive purpose) might be another approach. not refusing to create, but creating in ways that resist complete instrumentalization.

the paradox remains unresolved and probably unresolvable. every creative act needs energy transfer. every shared work enters exchange systems. every escape attempt becomes another example. but within this bind, momentary ruptures happen. spaces open, however briefly, where different values emerge. i've got no answers, just a heightened awareness of the bind itself. maybe that awareness is valuable, not as a solution, but as a more conscious inhabitation of an inescapable paradox. the tension becomes generative because it can be explored. not freedom from the market, but moments of friction within it. not escape from exchange, but exchanges that briefly exceed market logic.

maybe authenticity isn't about escaping exchange systems entirely, which seems impossible, but about the quality of attention we bring to our exchanges. when hsieh punched that time clock or when kawara documented he was still alive, they weren't outside exchange systems, but they transformed what was being exchanged. not products or commodities, but presence, attention, duration. forms of exchange that momentarily exceed market logic while acknowledging its inevitability.

in the end, creative energy keeps flowing, not because it escapes the bind, but because something in us refuses to be fully captured, even as we acknowledge capture is inevitable. this refusal might be the closest we get to authenticity. not a pure state beyond exchange, but a tension filled awareness that continuously questions the terms of engagement. authenticity emerges not as freedom from exchange, but as the ongoing negotiation with it. a beautiful futility, perhaps, but one that feels necessary nonetheless.