Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

by Hito Steyerl

What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization?
How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of "neurocurating," in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity.

In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.

What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world's most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, Philosophy, Politics, Art History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 2017

About the author

Hito Steyerl (sometimes spelled Štajerl) is a German filmmaker, visual artist, and author in the field of essayist documentary video. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a Ph.D in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Reviews

[Biddy Mahy · Rating 3 out of 5]

meh! Hito Steyerl's style captures a lot of what I dislike about art writing: inventing uninsightful hipstery jargon per paper, wordplay as the basis for philosophical inquiry (left me wondering if comparing digital spam to spam-as-canned-meat was all that productive), identifying pertinent political issues (but tbh mostly adopting sweeping generalisations despite endless lists) and concluding, with a shrug, that we can subvert capitalist hegemony through entertaining and chaotic modes of discourse, nonlinear communal networks etc. etc. etc! I got the sense while reading that she was taking rhetorical liberties that made the prose lively and interesting but perhaps at the expense of critical specificity which undermined her arguments slightly. Take this with a grain of salt tho because there were sections that I found rewarding + that I want to return to in a more comprehensive review.

[Scotty · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was the first book I finished this year. the title might make it look like an art book on first glance but notice the phrase 'planetary civil war' in the title. it's about the globalized world crumbling apart and devolving into a million little extra-territorial tax havens (see: switzerland, the caymans, the panama papers, etc). this is more a commentary on neoliberalism than on the art itself. but it does take time to criticize artists and critics who could be doing good as opposed to normalizing bad. less picassos, more pistolettos. the bookended first and last chapters are meh to be sure. too many adjectives for too few ideas. i'm sure they resonate live, with a crowd reacting to the speech, but on paper not so much. the book's best pieces are in the middle. they hit like a sledgehammer to the brain. overall very enjoyable. i haven't encountered an author this smart and engaging in a long time. sure, it gets a bit International Art English'y at times, but what do you expect? this was a very fucking book.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less about art than I anticipated and a lot more focused on the contemporary Art in relation to politics and globalization. Steyerl’s work makes a lot more sense after reading her well-supported theories. A lot of interesting topics about the future of new media art, at times it was a little dense or too abstract to me, but my favorite essay was called International Disco Latin!

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

slightly list-y run on sentences that clobber you with a pessimistic lens of our world. But! A lot of ideas worth pondering.

I struggle with art writing that is mostly about exposing the ills of the world instead of exploring the grace of art despite our humanity.

[Sole]

Casi abandono este libro porque la edición es bastante mala (hasta faltan las imágenes y están mal ubicadas respecto al texto) y porque no estaba entendiendo muy bien el punto, pero al final me alegro de haberlo seguido porque terminé leyendo varios ensayos muy buenos. Mi favorito es “Hablemos de fascismo” que se despacha en sólo unas páginas y de manera muy lúcida con un tema que varios autores rodean durante libros enteros sin llegar a vislumbrar tan bien las conexiones entre varios de los fenómenos que la autora apunta.

Me hubiera gustado que hablara más de arte y menos de arte contemporáneo.

[S D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hito Steyerl frames contemporary issues (late stage capitalism, algorithmic data processes, spam as both a food and type of communication, online romance scams, 3D printers, art as a currency, the use of Latin as a text placeholder, fascism, video games) in unique, thought provoking and sometimes confusing and heady ways.

I won’t pretend I fully understood all of this book (the last essay in particular was confounding) but I very much enjoyed it. Let’s say I grasped the overall concept of almost every essay, though it’s easy to get lost in the abundance of details. Not to mention that the subtle swapping of fiction and non-fiction. Using the book’s notes is a big help which I admit I didn’t realize until the end.

That said, I look forward to reading this again! Anyone who is willing to look at the aforementioned issues (and more) from a completely different angle than what I’m used to is absolutely welcome. This book made an impact on me though I’m not entirely sure how or in what way but I enjoy that ambiguity.

[Xaq Rothman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will admit this one was somewhat mystifying. As someone who is not particularly involved with contemporary fine art except as an occasional consumer, some of the essays seemed to whiz right by me. As someone who enjoys creative thinking about the effects of the Internet on art, politics, culture, etc., though, I enjoyed it. Steyerl definitely has a sense of humor and wordplay that is fun to see.

[Fiachra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steyerl takes the reader on a fun but anxiety-inducing journey. Often the links she makes can seem flimsy, with a lot of hypotheticals, but her viewpoint and style are charming nonetheless

[Dot Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed the chapter outlining the history of both spam & SPAM, and now will forever hold in my memory and wonderment that as a delicacy in Hawaii, traditional dishes from around the world have been creatively reimagined to incorporate spam, most beautifully producing the delightful reincarnation of macaroni cheese as Spamaroni & Cheese. What else will I retain from the book? A re-remembering of what was already half known about the neoliberal, privatised, automated, unsanctioned, warmongering world at hand; there was no huge enlightenment, no wider scope, I felt, no conciseness towards an ultimate answer (of what question?) but a general theme of reminding the reader of the interconnectedness of these things within our lives, and, occasionally mentioned, though not as much as I’d wish it to be, the art world; the insidious effects these policies, ideas or non ideas, and notions have as they play out upon a global sphere filled with drone warfare, art as currency and duty free warehouses of unseen and unaccounted for art. But. We are free to reimagine a parallel universe running alongside the pessimistic scope of the world that Hito constantly alludes to, and, amongst her more enlightening essays, we find can find the ways and means to begin to do so.

[Nathan Kruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

crazy intersection of military, art, economy, technology, and mental illness…..but not that crazy considering how interrelated these things are. incredibly relevant

sometimes the line between metaphor and real connection is blurred which occasionally makes it hard to follow, but also aways makes it interesting to read

[Clara Liang · Rating 4 out of 5]

scary, smart! a frenzied foray into our precarious, billowing, fucked up world! yeah i did feel like she sacrificed critical clarity for the sake of wit + wordplay in a way that was sometimes befuddling/ultimately unfruitful but also highly entertaining, very dazzling. loved the kissing stuff lol.

[Ypres]

Hito Steyerl tiene un cráneo privilegiado que le permite predecir el futuro de las inteligencias maquínicas observando sus tenues huellas en el presente. En Arte Duty Free, genuinamente uno de los libros más interesantes que he leído, Steyerl desbroza con su machete una selva de palabras-marketing que impide ver la guerra civil planetaria que se está librando en este mismo instante. Es una guerra que no se lucha solo con balas, sino también con servidores en la nube, y los campos de batalla principales son el ojo y, sobre todo, la percepción.
Aunque los últimos capítulos del libro me resultaron más aburridos e inaccesibles, pero los primeros 10 son increíbles. En ellos, Steyerl traza conexiones entre temas que aparentemente no tienen mucho que ver, y lo hace con un hilo que brilla en la oscuridad. Trata temas como el ahogamiento en mares de datos por inteligencias artificiales y su reconocimiento errado de patrones, la puesta en combate de las imágenes al servicio de la guerra óptica a través de la generación constante de nuevas imágenes sesgadas, la dificultad de discernir entre señal y ruido matemático, la realidad de los mercados de arte ocultos con pasarelas de pago alternativas para lavar dinero, la delegación (proxy) de la política en bots, el desencanto de todo marketing respecto al funcionamiento verdadero de la tecnología, el advenimiento social del tecnofeudalismo y el fascismo… genuinamente interesante y clarividente.

[Ygor Anario · Rating 3 out of 5]

Technology is the subject of sarcasm, and the ‘collateral damage’ of wordplay is possible insights that made me feel as if the author was pushing me to delve deeper into those links myself, to develop them. Each text presents its own set of absurd questions that sound poetic and always seem like the plot of a film. If this were comparable to the space race, what would be at stake is who would be the first to coin the trendiest terms in the art world.

[Bridget C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bonkers and eye opening! Learned a bunch about spam and art in the age of the internet. Great read and I definitely recommend it even if you’re not in the art world, as it’s pretty approachable and has a good sense of humor

[Julia Rap · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. There were many instances where I was too dumb to understand what the hell she was talking about. Nonetheless compelling and there were some funny jokes in this!

[Léon Nullans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very interesting
Some very complicated

She has this annoying aspect in the writing sometimes where she draws conclusions from word puns 🤔

[Srijoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

some parts of the book will stay with me for life, especially the chapter about spam and its origins. some parts were a miss for me and that's why the four stars but the analysis for every topic is *chef's kiss*

[Charlie Kruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hito Steyerl plays with language in such a concise and cogent way, it would be hard to navigate contemporary art circles without being somewhat acquainted with her. Her ability to explain the current conditions of neoliberalism, the recent rise of fascism, and the methods to confront them are always illuminating.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

📳💳💡🤳🖼💻🕹 📝🎀 i love her!!

[nis · Rating 4 out of 5]

highly (overly?) speculative but fun

[Brad Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

generally pretty good - information theory / media theory intertwined with a critique of neoliberal politics is 100% my thing. It wasn't the type of book I was expecting, I was thinking more in terms of the creation of art, but I really enjoyed the focus on art as detritus in our increasingly digital age. Super cool stuff that's all reasonably linked back to the profit and power structures that dominate our world.

That being said, a lot of this read to me like an anarchist buzzword list rather than nonfiction. And yeah, perhaps not all of it is necessarily nonfiction, sometimes Steyerl draws connections without laying the factual argumentative groundwork for such claims. Like in one area, Steyerl claims the act of speculation suppresses true representation of art which in turn drives the rise of alt-right fascism, and I just can't make those many jumps or at least don't have the patience to make said logical leaps, all in a few pages. And the book is also somewhat scattered in its ideas, which also makes it har to take seriously, and made me think more of an image in my mind of Steyerl just spitballing and jotting down any idea that sounds kind of radical and has the faintest trace of truth onto the page. And I don't really know how to reconcile this. By the end of the book, I had grown somewhat tired of these antics.

In the end, though, it did genuinely make me think more about our technological post-truth age from viewed through a media lens. In the world of increasing content, understanding how these great and dark power structures affect us and the world as a whole could not be any more important.

6/10

[Sam Russek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone else said this collection is “mystifying” and I agree—there were definitely portions that went over my head, not because of the subject matter, I don’t think, but because it was occasionally difficult to follow the structure of Steyerl’s argument. Take chapter 13, Let’s Talk About Fascism, for instance: it begins by defining two kinds of representation—cultural and political, and the way cultural representation increases at the expense of and in an inverse relationship to political representation—which are, respectively and taken together, very interesting! Then there’s a section break and suddenly we’re defining speculation as an economic and philosophical concept. But from there we begin to talk about speculating on representation itself and how that ties into fascism, and at that point it was difficult to follow the threads that pull everything together. Steyerl is a talented writer prone to sacrificing an argument for a good turn of phrase; sometimes it works, but other times it feels like an oxymoron-generating algorithm beating my brain into submission. The different topics she researches, from Google’s use of captcha’s to computational photography, are by themselves worth the read, but now that I’m putting down the book for the night I feel more frustrated than anything

[Ivan Labayne]

Hito Steyerl—these very two words—plus the current condition where I peruse her conform with my current intention. Somewhere, she spoke of “de-growing constructively,” substituting it for the more common notion & gesture of building, or constructing something out of destruction. I link this concept of de-growing with devolution, but one which could be willful, purposive, opposite mindless productivity. I think of stretching, reposing, lying down on chilly bricks only to reflect, be curious, concerned with the size of cold, inquiring upon the weight of objects or the feel of loss, of writer’s block, of missing your bestfriend, thinking of messing with purported orderliness. Nothing much is occurring: remember we’re lying down, stretching, reposing, with no inkling of doing concrete stuff, just brooding, figuring out how to de-grow constructively, how to not progress in the direction of something whose point we’ve missed, or whose design we don’t truly comprehend.


https://chopsueyngarod.wordpress.com/...

[Jaga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay so listen. Interesting group of essays on the place of art in current context(s).

I cannot escape the feeling though, probably because of the author's writing style, that each piece of writing was striving at once to be as much *about* art as it was trying to *be* art. There are points where the author will gesture to a series of ideas scattered on the floor, and the reader can only remark that they are the same colour, hoping that staring some more will reveal some secret the author hopes to convey. It's very much the sister of the confusion one has wandering into a single-room installation in a museum and failing to find the plaquette explaining what the hell is going on. Adjectives swing a baseball bat to the head then the prose grabs you by the tie and whisks you to the next installation before you have a chance to catch yourself, cycle repeat.

All this being said: when you look at one of the scattered floor ideas and the feverish gesturing of the author suddenly inspires a realisation of a cohesive idea, it's gratifying and worth having a think about.

[Callum Cound · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 'Duty Free Art', Steyerl's iconic and accessible writing style shines through in this collection of recent essays/ lectures. Working through the concepts that centuries of unregulated art market capitalism have given us, she makes important points around how we can organise, collectivise and resist against what seems to be all pervasive challenges in the art-world.
I super recommend the chapter on 'International Disco Latin' (a version of which can be found here: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/45/601...) which attempts to demarcate English as an/the International Art Language, arguing in favour of the language of exploited art workers in forming a bulwark against the fascism of language and the monolithic power structures that keep art in the hands of the few.
Hito Steyerl is ever prescient in her analysis of contemporary conditions of art / production, and this book further illustrates what an important figure she is in the art landscape of today.

[ashes ➷ · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't believe this book has no low reviews with text... I don't know if I should be suspicious, but the book itself is practically unreadable. I lost all confidence in Steyerl when she tried to get deep about--wait for it--Lorem Ipsum. The use of Lorem Ipsum represents a relationship between absence and presence now. And then she tried to pessimistically analyze the change in text in Lorem Ipsum, because the original phrase is jumbled in it, and made some claim that this was negative and reminded her of "Cicero’s head and hands cut off and ending up being nailed to the rostra on the Forum Romanum following his assassination."

I mean, okay. If you think it is that deep.

Overall this book just feels impossible to comprehend. The text is purposefully long-winded and coated in poetic nonsense, and no points are ever solidly made. It's like an avante-garde film was ironed onto a printout of someone's spoken-word poetry. DNF'ed.

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alongside luminaries like Baudrillard, Berger, and Benjamin, Styerl reintroduces us to art and image through the context of the political, metaphysical, and economic realms in which they persist. From the Syrian Electronic Army to email scammers, the proliferation of spam, and the reorientation of art as currency, Duty Free Art is broad in its approach and bountiful in its examples in which the real and unreal continue to fuse themselves.

Appropriately, the subtitle, Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, is front and center within Steyerl's essays. The context of our new machinations and communications are key. We are in an era of permanent war, of adversarial attacks on all sides and art is both a weapon and a battlefield. This contextualization allows Steyerl to not only process the present but to navigate toward a possible future, one in which the real may be duplicated as the digital is now, or where humans might acknowledge the shifting of the real and face it head-on.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this 2019 book in 2023 I would say it was about three years ahead of its time. Now it makes sense. The enviromment in which artists function has changed immeasurably of late and we must grip that new reality, if not to control it at least to understand it.
“the age of planetary civil war”, indeed! Unholy alliances have bubbled to the surface recently and can be critically examined.
I’m not sure about some of the statements, like those about the external processing and alteration of smart phone images. Is there time, even at the speed of tech, for all that modification between pressing the shutter and viewing? But they are prompting me to investigate, (and hold my autonomous DSLR tighter).
If I have a criticism of the book it is that it could use a rewrite, or at least a thorough work through by an editor. Sometimes it feels more like a late night speculative ramble among friends. But I forgive it that because it makes one think and grasps more than a few nettles.

[Robbie Herbst · Rating 4 out of 5]

these essays are exercises in reimagining the purposes of contested spaces and objects. the intervention often is related largely to the form in question. it's a tank in a museum being driven off to fight in war. it's an artwork in a tax haven being used as a currency. it's a national museum sheltering refugees. it's a broken computer image frozen in crystalized LED. I both appreciate and am slightly irked by Steyerl's style (steyl?), which often times defers argument for word play. And, like, yes, I like word play, but it can grate at times. I really liked the essays on spam (prescient for the AI age) and fascism, in which the crisis of representation in politics is precisely an aesthetic question.

It doesn't quite broach my favorite art writing (Ben Davis 9.5 theses on art and class), which is lucid and systematic. But this aims to become art in itself, which Davis's work does not, which I suppose is it's own merit. Anyway, I'll definitely read her new book.

[CY Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's patchy, uneven, sometimes incomprehensible (to me at least), but I was completely absorbed by this brilliant book. It took me through the painful yet enlightening stages of some kind of 21st century decline and rebirth in a way that's desperately needed now. Someone needed to break free, and Hito Steyerl moves on a higher plain altogether with the ability to see above and beyond the immediate problems of serving an increasingly uniform world of algorithmic instruction, vast spreadsheet data and the mute tribe of automatons. Is the Internet Dead? Yes, but it hasn't even been born yet. International Disco Latin made me rethink every input in a new way. Proxy Politics, Signal and Noise, shows how the binary world was created. I'm particularly interested in the chapter on spam and scam in Her Name Was Esperanza, and how the digital world plays on gestalt psychology.