On a Walkway to Hell: Vantages on Art and Life's Exhaustion

In this article the widespread phenomenon of neoliberal institutions’ production of architectural vantages, windows or walkways onto working artists or ‘creatives’ is subject to a double analysis. On the one hand, the spectacularised views are read as an outcome of art’s own ‘corporealization’ and neo-avant-garde movements’ development of life performances. On the other hand, the resources of biopolitical theory are used to critique the splitting of the artist’s creative appearance from their own reflexive powers of self-affection fixing them as a static ‘form of life’. This phenomenon, by which the artist’s bare life is designated creative in itself, is read as co-extensive with the biosocial figure of homo economicus in which competitive market behaviour is given a biological and evolutionary grounding. Finally, the article compares these vistas of creative life to capitalist biotech’s enclosure of nature’s generativity in the interest of producing speculative and commodified lifeforms and to the detriment of existing life.