Hito Steyerl “Is a Museum a Factory?” e-flux journal reader 2009, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009, pp.28-42

The hatred description of Steyerl, “Former workers have been…dramatically as the factory”(Steyerl, 29) has showed how clearly the factory is becoming a new form of labour with the overflow of media work being displayed in social factory of the museum. The factory now turned into a contemporary museum, the work have been “multiplexed, digitized…rapidly commercialized and neoliberalism” (Steyerl, 29) which it refers back to the idea of “art and market as irreconcilable opposites. The line between the two has become highly permeable”(Graw,81). This also exemplifies the idea of “whether a child collects model…personal treasures will be made to public”, which the individuality becomes collectiveness and the original is shared amongst others which then becomes the duplicate. “The conservative response to the exodus…sanitized, sequesters, cut off from reality”(Steyerl, 30). Perhaps this is the process of being a museum, where it is set up for not a single person to view but open for everyone, “The workers who left the factory…reemerge as a spectacle inside of it.”(Steyerl, 33) which relates to the idea of Appadurai where he dealt with the material that goes into a factory and comes out as anew material with cultures, an exodus gets involved in the process of “social factory” and oped to new range of discourses. The museum, a social factory, it is a good way to share knowledge, gather information and they are trusted materials, but is it necessarily advantageous to everyone? The fact the individualism is being turned into collectivism, where are the intrinsic values? Or is it how the economy is turning us to develop to create new things based on the ideas revealed already? “a singular event… founding new history in which it will exist and be conceived from now on – as the revolutionary act of founding a new art.”(Verwoert, 103). Due to the fact that the materials are exposed to spectators who they get affected by the work which it then takes a role being political to the public. The problem of reconstruction of what factory is as to the space of production and work is clearly stated in the article, “If the factory is everywhere…no way to escape relentless productivity”(Steyerl,40).

Hito Steyerl “Is a Museum a Factory?” e-flux journal reader 2009, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009, pp.28-42

Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market a Celebrity Culture, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009, pp.81-94 & 112-116.

Jan Verwoert “Gestures Towards a New Life: The Avant-Garde as Historical Provocation, 2007”, Utopias: Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery, London: The MIT Press, 2009, pp.103-111