Andrew, Rana, I know nothing about this particular outfit other than its email advertisement, so calling it a 'sweatshop' was more an act of parody a la 'spam kr!it!k' rather one of analysis. The subject line 'business' seemed rather bland. Yet, it was also not random, as the message struck me for several reasons.
First, paintings are treated like any other commodity whose costs can be lowered by outsourcing production into a low-wage country. So also for art, Southern China becomes the 'low cost manufacturing base.' Second, like many other low-end businesses, this proposition is spewed about randomly as spam. In fact, nettime got it several time (that's why I noticed it). Third, it contains some rather untrustworthy claims such as the painting being done by 'famous artists', though they remain unspecified. Most importantly, though, it introduces an extreme separation -- extreme in the context of Western art, more common in the textile industry -- between ordering and producing. While made-to-order art has never entirely gone out of fashion with the artist becoming an autonomous subject (so the story line) it has been transformed into an intimate process ( as in having your portrait painted). As such, it's based on a supposedly deep relationship between the person doing the ordering and the one doing the execution. Now, this email indicates that two things are happening. The made-to-order relationship is reappearing with all the loss of status that entails for the artists (a 'famous artist' yet anonymous, like the great medieval artists/artisans). Yet, at the same time, this relationship has been broken under the cost-imperative. This allows to enjoy the product which, like a brand, has a status value much higher than its use value, without any regard to the context of its production. While this is not a sufficient cause to assume sweatshop production conditions, it's a necessary step to establish them for the production of high-value objects. Felix On Sunday 01 August 2004 18:03, Andrew Ross wrote: > Re: the subject line. Just a matter of interest, why do you assume this is > a sweatshop operation? Simply because it is in China? Or is it impossible > to imagine the condition of Chinese artisans as comparing favorably with > their Western counterparts? <...> -- ----+-------+---------+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]