Toward a Queer Postminimalism

Excerpt:

The Task of the Collector 

The relationship between art and commerce is clear: art is sold in galleries, which operate within the art market, which is made up mainly of dealers, artists, collectors, and curators. Even art that interrogates commerce—including Kayode Ojo’s—circulates in this sphere. This contradiction brings about the challenge of categorizing artworks as objects rather than as inquiries with their own context. The looping nature of art’s relationship to commerce and then to inquiry mirrors Karl Marx’s commentary on hoarding, which he calls a “Sisyphean task,” one that is “boundless in its nature.”1 In other words, the collector of objects (whether garments or artworks or materials with which to make art) has no end in sight. 

According to Marx, the logic of hoarding concerns money and its value, and it rests on the concept that “value is inseparable from the value-form.”2 This means that the object (value) itself can become a fetish or a commodity (value form). The intersection of fashion and art, as well as e-commerce and the art business, points back directly to the idea of hoarding. In the past decade, the exploitative nature of the fashion industry has been widely publicized. Garment workers, oſten in non-Western countries, are subjected to a practice akin to modern slavery through inhumane working hours driven by the overconsumption of fast fashion.3 And yet the Western public continues to accumulate new clothing in excess, only to discard it when storage runs out or T-shirts rip, thereby making room for continued accumulation. 

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