Compressed capitalist circulation makes culture value disintermediation as a style.

Evidence

There’s no accounting for taste, but what accounts for these recent consistent pressures against mediation? The beginning of an answer lies in the commonality between these art trends and the dynamics of twenty-first-century capitalist production and circulation. For it turns out that this urge to cut out the middleman does not upraise art so much as merge it with a sweeping spate of other social and commercial activities, from gig labor to self-publishing to e-brokerage. The big business of “disintermediation” accompanies the aesthetic happenings we’re observing: flexibility and fluidity, emanation and connectivity, directness and instantaneity are economic premiums as much as they are artistic ones. And it is this confluence that coheres a cultural style: “immediacy.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 20

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core thesis link to Jameson (postmodernism as cultural logic of late capitalism); grounds the entire book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The economic base in pressing on the aesthetic superstructure to eliminate mediation.