“All that was solid melted into the ‘Cloud’”, to paraphrase the essential metaphor of Marx and Engels from The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air”.[1] Melting with modernization the previous eras (within the framework of economics and politics), that is, “solid modernity”, capitalism, with its further development, managed to melt itself into itself. Melting, dissolving solid structures into airy structures (“All that is solid melts into air”), it itself became a kind of anti-structure, a kind of non-structure. The staged development of this melting, dissolving is the staged “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society”.[2]

From here on:

(i) Firstly, “solid” structures, through constant revolutionization, are transformed into “liquid” structures [liquid], as Zygmunt Bauman notes: solid modernity is transformed into liquid modernity. The loss of the center (as the basis of the solid structure), the so-called decentralization, has led to the establishment of loose and unstable connections, connections that are changeable and variable, short-lived, that is, nothing remains permanent, but is transformed into something ephemeral. Since such structures are impermanent, they cannot be replaced by others, because those others are also such, “subject to dissolution and, therefore, equally impermanent,” Bauman concludes.[3] Industrial society replaces feudal society.

(iiа) Then, becoming such, impermanent, solid structures begin to evaporate, that is, to transform into “gaseous” structures [gazеuх], as Yves Michaud writes, as a kind of even more unstable structure due to the even weaker connections within it. Neoliberal capital is a reflection of such a structure, both in economic and political and cultural terms. And so Michaud concludes that a double logic prevails, as far as culture is concerned: “on the one hand, the experience of contemporary art takes on a diffuse and nebulous form of aesthetic experience, but this occurs within still conventional and recognized frameworks (gallery, museum, art school, art event), so that “art is spread everywhere, and therefore it is nowhere” or “museums are [no longer] places of pilgrimage for the devoted but stages of tourist journeys”.[4]

(iib) By interpreting hybridization, multiplicity and mutogenicity as categories of even more unstable structural connections, Paul Ardenne, in the spirit of the gaseous structure, refers to the view that “the contemporary work of art is the sum of accumulated and mixed styles” that do not create meanings, and hence values ​​anymore. And therefore, he concludes, the interpretation, evaluation and historicization of the work of art can no longer be spoken of and therefore only “stutters”.[5] This shows that the solid structure has lost its last point of support or reference. Post-industrial society (a society based on services, rather than production) replaces industrial society.

(iii) All this decentralization has led not only to the loss of the center, but also to the ignorance of where it was or, if it still exists, where it is? This is what the supposed so-called “Cloud” culture points to. Cloud culture, as a metaphor, refers to the current “structure” [now in quotation marks]. In circumstances in which digitality, virtuality and artificial intelligence dominate the appropriation (albeit arbitrarily given) of the most unstable thing: data, any structure will have to be completely unstable and, hence, completely non-referential: meanings begin to have a temporary, or rather, short-term existence and character (if they exist at all) and, therefore, they are unfounded (false; fake) values. The Cloud “structure” is that of stock market speculation, of bitcoins, of “knowledge” reduced to the possibility (and only that) of informing (and nothing more than that): information (or rather, its free “purchase” (since we ourselves place information about ourselves in cyberspace)) and possession of it becomes crucial and fundamental.

A Cloud, which is somewhere-there, replaces gas with radio waves and frequencies (hotspots for wireless networks: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, wireless local-area network (WLAN) etc.). It becomes a metaphor for a certain clouded modernity: people no longer go to libraries, but download PDF books; they no longer go to brothels, but surf “adult Web sites”; they no longer go to casinos, but log in to online gambling; they no longer go to meetings in boardrooms, but on Zoom, on Facetime or in Metaverse (virtual worlds in which users represented by avatars interact, usually in 3D and focused on social and economic connection); they no longer go to an atelier or workshop or to sales galleries and art fairs, but post and buy “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs) … they no longer go to museums, but on Google and/or Google Images… Data is being commodified. The information society replaces the post-industrial society.

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Therefore (1): What is the museum today? Something placed between the already clouded culture (cyberspace) above it and that of the street, below it (actual space).

Hence, if solid structures were located in temples, churches, royal and papal collections (i); museums and galleries inaugurated the work of art as a marketable commodity (commodification) (iia); gaseous works transformed themselves into impermanent hybrids (iib), then the Cloud (iii) produces and forces a “grounding”: from museum fortifications (or the museum as a fortress (hard structure) in which the bourgeois conception of culture and art is preserved and secured; as a closed public space) back to the open public space, “on the street”. And there, on the street, in the open air, as in the Athenian agora, things happen that are ephemeral and that are not subject to any market (i.e. ownership) logic, and hence economy. This and such resistance and struggle against commodification is reduced to the symbolic, but also structural conflict: the street stickers stuck in all possible and impossible places are its Declaration against and against the street bronze from the "Skopje 2014" project, for example.

Therefore (2): Participatory public art is or represents the resistance and struggle of the citizenry [citoyen] and the civil structured system against the bourgeoisie [middle class] and the bourgeois arrangement of the system that affirms property from its first to its last instances. Citizenship with street art, or rather with [now in quotes] “art” on the street, nullifies the proposed metaphor from this discussion as a “two-way alley”, by which the artwork performed in the open public space is relocated back to the museum (to become part of the museum’s collection of commodifications), and represents the metaphor of a “one-way alley”: for a work that will last as long as it lasts, until its self-destruction, decay, disappearance on a certain surface, in some alley, on some wall, garage or lamppost. Because, if the bourgeois capitalist structure subsumes everything under the concept of commodification, then the citizenry’s anti-capitalist structure must act only as anti-commodification.

For no other reason than because of what arises from such structures, which is that: in what economic and ideological structure things are organized and placed, such will be the society, such will be the culture, such will be the “art”.

Nebojša Vilić, Ph.D. (1962), art historian and full professor at University “St. Cyril and Methodius” in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia. Ongoing cultural and societal criticism project on Instagram and Youtube: “The. Out.s” Lives, thinks and rides road bike in Struga and Skopje.