Culture and its productions can be studied from many perspectives, including politics, economics, social development, and art—even through individual points of view and behaviors—but they cannot be reduced to singular ideas. In the Western post-Romantic tradition, culture was associated with and purportedly practiced by rootless urban bohemians who lived “freely” and colorfully, but as if they had no organized self or place. After 36 years of Japanese occupation immediately followed by the Korean War, Korea endured profound cultural trauma. In this chaotic era, the US played the role of military and cultural savior, becoming a role model as well providing a paradigm for the display and dissipation of wealth. The culture of the US Army had a striking and direct influence on impoverished Korean youth in the 1950s and 60s, generating awe, possibility and confusion. Based on envy, emulation and misunderstanding, post-Korean War Americanization generated the false assumption that Americanization was the equivalent of Westernization and modernization. It fostered dreams and delusions about the sophisticated or “high class” nature of Western-type modernity and its cultures.

For recent generations Venice has been maintained as an image by a kind of conspiracy between its picturesque scenery and an almost infinite commercial viability as a tourist attraction. Venice was a compulsory destination for the Grand Tour undertaken by European artists, aristocrats and the upwardly mobile from the 17th to the 19th century—a tradition that was recalibrated at the turn of the twentieth century by the advent of the Venice Biennale and has been reinvigorated by the spectacular rise of the global art market after the 1980s. Participating artists and opening week VIPs and art world insiders are still, perhaps more than ever, seduced by the allure of the city. There is something absurd and irrational in the staging of this unending seduction and its dream of conjoining culture, politics and commercialism under the camouflage of international finance. As Susan Strange noted in 1986, the integration of worldwide finance gave rise to an economic order predicated on risk and gambling: “Casino Capitalism.” An international art event such as the Venice Biennale has both causal and symptomatic relations to the imperialism of this order. My work in the 2017 Korean Pavilion suggests that Casino Capitalism signals the death of art, but also presages a new kind of hope for its resurrection, in the era of speculation and excess.

Cody Choi
March 2017