Explaining Milady

Milady is contagious social engineering. Conceptual art, in contrast, is the product of artists whose sole skill lies in writing grant applications – a socially prestigious form of begging.

Milady means Engagement: seeing the world through the white veil of betrothal; riding across the network as an honourable knight; liking and sharing without grudges what is good or funny or true. Milady means accelerating network feedback, filling in the outlines of little hearts with red, engaging positive loops, not serving the vanity of sycophantic subjects, ‘face f@gs’, who treat online status as a zero-sum game which they are selfishly trying to win.

Milady is an interactive art project. Milady, like all good art projects, is a movement, a group endeavour. To explain Milady, one must first explain contemporary art and why it is so bad.

Contemporary art has abused the beautiful nature of engagement, has made a fool out of the inner bride in all of us, stood us up at the altar. Its pathetic attempts at making gallery installations ‘interactive’ has merely put an insulting veneer of Care on the self-serving logic of art institutions. Like a recent London show where visitors were served hamburgers made from a single cow whose bones were put insultingly, blasphemously in the centre of an exhibition room, contemporary artists think that audience-members are dumb yuppies whose life revolves around the autonomous cycles of metropolitan consumption.

Milady makes you the artist; Milady gives you the royalties. There is no condescension in Milady, not because it attracts ‘good people’ – that Inquisitional idea – but because it possesses no incentives that could foster such an attitude.

Have you witnessed contemporary art elicit engagement that wasn’t awkward, that didn’t involve people standing around, waiting for the installation to ‘speak’ to them, which it won’t have time to do, if it ever could, before the viewers’ defensively or aggressively capture it with their smartphones? The many shades of yuppie that is the prime consumer of contemporary art is drawn to its white insipid venues by a prestige derived from its ancient glories and underwritten by its inflated market value. What people recognise is not aesthetic value but institutional power.

The Dadaists were prescient in their critique of the institutionalisation of art. Duchamp’s urinal was poking fun at the idea that art is whatever’s exhibited in a gallery. Warhol completed art’s desacralisation and represents the closest one can get to a break with artistic tradition. Yet the institutional paradigm has remained the dominant one. Museums have expanded, grown into vast entertainment complexes, forming a mass-media ecosystem that manages experiences. ‘As long as there exists an asymmetry (or distance) between producer and receiver,’ writes Dominick Chen, ‘the modality of cultural production would inevitably lead back to a religious power structure’. All mass media is structured religiously on the model of the mediaeval Church with its clergy claiming a monopoly on access to God. Milady finds the face of God in the margins of culture, in the moments of dejection and depravity that the Human Security System wants to censor, that bourgeois subjectivity wants to repress: God is where you least expect him. Not in a cathedral, a fat bishop’s seat, but in a burning bush out in the wilderness. So on the internet, humanity’s greatest piece of work – nothing else comes close in man-hours dedicated – Milady shares and re-shares divine signatures, being neither producer nor receiver but simply vessel, vector of an impersonal force.

What does conceptual art, the darling of the art-system, tell us about the relation between mind and world? Not, I think, that the world is richer than our concepts – many of the artworks prove that it can be very poor indeed – but that it is not straightforwardly amenable to intentional action. Brad Troemel asked back in 2010 whether it is ‘still necessary to define art by intent and context’ outside the context of art institutions. He argued that by the most up-to-date theoretical standards of the legacy art world, the most advanced art was not produced by artists and exhibited in galleries, but appeared in 4chan messaging boards. A clear supersession had occurred: museums, curators and gallerists had failed, as Hegel would put it, by their own lights – they had failed to live up to their own concepts.

Milady is art that, like all good art, exists first and is conceptualised later. Milady is art that the most advanced theories of art would recognise as one of the highest forms – relational aesthetics – whose point of departure is, as Nicolas Bourriaud puts it, ‘the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’.

Art requires artistic skill – the practical skill of shaping and manipulating reality. This used to be confined to artisanal and representational skills – sculpting in marble, painting in oil. The reality that Milady manipulates is the networked reality of the internet: the skill of Milady, what it is unsurpassed in, is its ability to navigate and accelerate internet social networks. Milady is contagious social engineering. Conceptual art, in contrast, is the product of ‘artists’ whose sole skill lies in writing grant applications: a socially prestigious form of begging.

Bourriaud states in his theory-book Postproduction (2002):

‘artists intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing’

Milady takes this ideal and applies it to networked reality as such. Milady doesn’t ghettoise itself to ‘art history’, but – like 4chan before it – shares all types of internet content. Where 4chan was largely blackpilled, Milady is whitepilled, angels of Capital acceleration. Milady runs on memetic logic one level up: whatever is posted becomes instantly parodied through waves of spontaneously coordinated reposting. Milady does not recognise intellectual ownership, does not consider its work anything other than the amplification of what is good.

Cyberspace is sadly primary space: the ‘real world’ is its back office, its replaceable hardware. Centuries old cities are being refashioned for the purpose of looking good on instagram and what is rare and delicate is just grist for the content mill. ‘Today everything exists to end in a photograph’ Susan Sontag wrote in the seventies, peak accumulation time that has shown no sign of abating. Nothing can have intrinsic value in a culture of appetitive possession, no mountain can be allowed to be a mountain: web2 social media leads to entropy. Milady is the realisation that the only way out of the present situation is through.

For a long time we thought that Mark Zuckerberg was the face of the network. Today we know that face is Milady.