“Mimesis of the Alienated”: Commodity Form and Artwork’s Autonomy in late Capitalism: An Analysis of Hirst’s For the Love of God and Santiago Sierra

Abstract

The article offers a critical reading of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God and Santiago Sierra’s oeuvre, interpreted as two antithetical way to deal with the complex relationship between autonomous artwork and commodity form. To this end, the contribution first clarifies the aesthetic dimension of commodity form: it will be shown that commodity’s social performativity is necessarily carried out within an aesthetic medium. On this basis, and by drawing back to Theodor W. Adorno’s understanding of the concepts of art’s aesthetic autonomy and aura, it will be then proposed an analogy between commodity fetishistic abstraction and artwork’s aesthetic autonomy. This theoretical background will be finally used in interpreting Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God and Santiago Sierra’s artistic performances: the first will be read as artistic radicalisation of commodity’s abstraction, whereas the second as attempts to exposes the social relations embedded in and concealed by commodity fetishism.

Keywords: commodity form, fetishism, artwork, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Damien Hirst, Santiago Sierra