The Cultural Body’s Death by a Thousand Cuts: Why Society Is No Longer a Body and Why It Can Be Cut to Pieces

Abstract

This essay explores the British, Russian and Greek pavilions at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and a marginal event that took place at the foundation Prada di Ca’ Corner della Regina during a visit to the exhibition opening of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The author examines the relationships between art, money and power as indicators of the tensions of post-democracy, post-citizenship and the increasingly fraught representations of the cultural and social body. The Inhalt (latent content), in an Adornian aesthetic interpretation, is a tool by which to understand the contemporary dismantling of society and the concurrence of art in the sanctioned representations of the body politic. The ‘cut’ becomes the definition and defining element of a contemporary Heideggerian Seinsfrage (the Being), creating the premise for an aesthetic and social discourse that is based on mutilation of the cultural and social body and a re-feudalization of democratic societies.