This thesis offers a periodization of the present according to which contemporary art
and visual culture are understood to be symptomatic of an increasingly pervasive
pessimistic social, political and ecological outlook. This pessimism I will claim is
what is authentically new about our contemporary cultural forms, which are directed
towards a particular form of humour and stupidity. Core elements in the
periodization include the limitation of imaginative horizons expressed in the well-known
remark of Fredric Jameson’s that it is easier to imagine the end of the world
than the end of capitalism, as well as the pervasive sense that nature is in a state of
perpetual and endemic crisis and the idea that modern computing technology is
making us stupider than we have ever been before. I argue that these issues are
symptomatic of what Gilles Deleuze, in 1990, termed the societies of Control – a
world of corporate power, ubiquitous computing, data extraction and financial
capitalism that has intensified since its early diagnosis.
However, dominant narratives of art and visual culture continue to theorize
artistic production according to traditionally avant-garde categories of resistance,
criticality, transgression and subversion. This presumes art to have an agency that is
difficult to imagine in the current social situation. In this respect, the thesis in part
constitutes a critical reflection on the pressures placed upon our existing models of
art and visual culture - for example, and centrally, the idea of an ‘avant-garde’ - by
current social and technological conditions. Building on these observations, the
thesis proposes a new model of contemporary art and visual culture that has no
agency: images under control that are formed, as epiphenomena, by technological
apparatuses of Control; studying examples such as extreme sports stunts, internet
memes, online trolls, bad quality jpegs and impassive ‘artworks’. The purpose is to
ask what value we can place on these emergent cultural forms, which seem to mirror,
reflect and reiterate a pessimistic worldview deeply entrenched in the societies of
Control