Mediatic art exposes how immediacy’s expressive styles serve capital circulation

Evidence

In both of these shows, the camera’s commitment to context and collectivity zips away from immediacy’s intimacy and confessionalism, while the themes and settings center the changing fortunes of capitalist production and capitalist circulation. Kardashian is to Burtynsky as Fleabag is to Queen Sugar; skin and gaze parried by infrastructure and establishing swoops. The style of impersonal and scaled exploration of production remediates the manifestiveness, expressiveness, and emanativeness that artists of the self, confessional posers, and antifictional authors hock as authentic, showing instead how these desirable elements of present culture are conditioned by economic imperatives to circulate. Arts of mediation make apparent this relationship between media technology and capitalist valorization, just as they also interlace forms of relation like the family with the corporation, or romance with the police, or mentorship with patriarchy. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 362

Categorization

• XREF: Gives concrete features to pair against Jameson’s theory of postmodernism and pastiche — the reader is judging Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson here.
• ADDENDUM: Kardashian/Burtynsky and Fleabag/Queen Sugar dichotomies serve the reader’s ‘Grafting & Growth’ and other essays as examples of mediation as collective infrastructure.