Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies by Boris Groys

Jeff Koons’ design for collector Dakis Joannou’s personal yacht.

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The economy of the internet demonstrates this economy of post-Duchampian art even for an external spectator. The internet is in fact no more than a modified telephone network, a means of transporting electric signals. As such, it is not “immaterial,” but thoroughly material. If certain communication lines are not laid, if certain gadgets are not produced, or if telephone access is not installed and paid, then there is simply no internet and no virtual space. To use traditional Marxist terms, one can say that the big communication and information technology corporations control the material basis of the internet and the means of producing of virtual reality: its hardware. In this way, the internet provides us with an interesting combination of capitalist hardware and communist software. Hundreds of millions of so-called “content producers” place their content on the internet without receiving any compensation, with the content produced not so much by the intellectual work of generating ideas as by the manual labor of operating the keyboard. And the profits are appropriated by the corporations controlling the material means of virtual production.
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