Streaming Liquidity Inc.: Singularization and Commodification of the Digital Artwork

Abstract

Many digital artworks today exist uncomfortably between, on the one hand, the political economy of the art world—with its insistence on unique, auratic, and therefore valuable objects—and, on the other, that of the contemporary media environment at large, dominated by the imperatives of near-limitless reproduction and unrestricted circulation. As such, digital artworks make up commodities of a very particular kind, bound up as their economic valorization is in what I propose to call a dialectic of singularization and commodification. In this dialectic, they are at once marked as discreet from digital culture at large (hence their status as artworks), and drawn to its promise of mass-distributed ‘democratization’.

In order to exemplify and concretize this proposal, I will examine the case of Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014). Not only will I argue that this single-channel video piece offers a (self-)critical analysis of the larger socio-economic market contexts in which it operates; I will also demonstrate how the practical logistics of its commodification and distribution exemplify the aforementioned dialectic. More specifically, I will assert that the possibility to stream Liquidity Inc. on the website of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (which purchased the work in 2014) complicates its economic situatedness and therefore challenges its status as artwork—resulting in very real conflicts of interest.