Indeed, sharing is key. Not only is there nothing “gross” about it, it’s constitutive for the art! Often and for the most part this means sharing others’ work, whether simply discussing it, playing/mixing it as DJ, and so on. But invariably – we have all felt this – the work of others touches on, but never quite captures what one at that moment sees as relevant to share – this lack emerges as a space for one’s own work to fill. That is, all of these acts of sharing generate a milieu in which one’s own work can mean something. The work helps bring forth the milieu, but the work as such does not pre-exist it; rather, the milieu determines it retrospectively. Sharing, in other words, brings forth a world, which discloses the work for what it is. Most primordially, I see sharing and art-making as forms of worlding. Practically, sharing does take on all of the forms associated with promotion, as well as creating and performing the work – but its constitutive role in worlding is key.
Promotion, then, only becomes “gross” when it entails the removal of work from milieu or world – either when considered as a “general strategy” or when it performs certain equations (“work” = bundle of aesthetic/historical properties; manifestation of Self, etc.) The “grossness” we attribute to advertising lies not in the fact others are annoyed by spam, but in the reasons behind the annoyance – that is, that the work may no longer be disclosed as such. In other words, the elevation of advertising to a general, world-independent strategy is noxious precisely because it entails the destruction of worlds.
How then, did advertising come to replace sharing? Sharing as such presupposes a “general economy”, in which the fundamental question that characterizes milieus or societies is how to distribute excess (energy, creativity, etc.) rather than a “restricted economy” founded upon scarcity (because restricted economy is teleological; it presupposes an unrestricted right to “progress” or “growth” – this is how scarcity becomes an issue as populations run up against carrying capacities and so on). Sharing follows the logic of gift and sacrifice (or in its negative mode, theft), rather than the value-propositions of “exchange value” or in its Marxist reformulation (in which there is only a minimal difference), “use value”. In either guise, “right” or “left”, either notion of value can be constitutive for the restricted-economy paradigm. Exchange value or use value become in other words how everything, including artworks, show up. Both rely on a reductiveness that characterizes all entities as exchangeable, whether simply in terms of value (by Economics proper), or as bundles of physical properties (by Science), aesthetic qualities (by Art), and so on. Both exchange-value and use-value commodify the artwork, they strip it of all roles in bringing forth worlds in which it may be disclosed. Their key weapon, far less visible than overt commodification, is aesthetics – the search for world-independent characteristics or qualities which come to speak for the work and prevent it from speaking on behalf of its world. And if a work cannot speak, if its world collapses, there is no longer a possibility of sharing it. It is in this sense that sharing becomes corrupted into its derivative mode of advertising with its own vision of worldless commodities.
