Anxiety Behind the Glitter

Today, contemporary art appears more dazzling than ever. Art fairs around the world draw hundreds of thousands of visitors, and record-breaking prices are set at auctions.

In Korea as well, Frieze Seoul has become a focal point for the Asian art market, while regional fairs such as Art Busan and Art Gwangju continue to expand. Social media feeds are flooded with exhibition snapshots, and blockbuster shows draw long lines of eager visitors. Yet behind this spectacle lies a deep unease. The meaning of works and the essence of art are increasingly sidelined, replaced by prices, brands, and images. This is what we may call the “age of role reversal.”
 


What Does Role Reversal Mean?

Role reversal is not a mere rhetorical flourish. It refers to the condition in which what should be the purpose is reduced to a means, and instruments or external markers come to dominate the essence itself.
 
The essence of art lies in creation, aesthetic exploration, and autonomy. But today this essence is no longer allowed to function; instead, market logic and image consumption reign as if they were the essence. Should we accept this situation as a new paradigm, or regard it as a distortion where the essential is overshadowed by the inessential? This is the existential question that contemporary art must confront.

The Korean Context: From Dansaekhwa to Young Artists

Let us first look at the Korean scene. Over the past decade, ‘Dansaekhwa’ (Korean monochrome painting) gained international recognition and became branded as “Korean modernism.” Yet its discourse was consumed less as aesthetic achievement than as a marketable cultural brand and investment vehicle. A similar trajectory is evident among younger artists: rather than the content of their work, what comes first is the label—“a rising artist you must buy now.” The artwork becomes a certificate of market value, while the inner meaning of creation is pushed aside.

The Global Context: Branded Artists and the NFT Bubble

Globally, the situation is little different. Artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst wield more power as brands and commercial icons than through the intrinsic content of their work. The NFT boom was a quintessential case in which “scarcity guaranteed by blockchain” was packaged as artistic value regardless of artistic substance. When the hype subsided, what remained was a speculative bubble and a collapse of trust. Art has become subsumed under a new regime of value—sign capitalism—where signs and capital are inseparably fused.

What Is Sign Capitalism?

“Sign capitalism” refers to a system in which capital is no longer confined to material production but circulates through images, brands, and signs as exchange values in themselves.

Jean Baudrillard’s notion of sign-value pointed out that commodities are consumed not merely for use or price but for the symbolic meanings they carry. Contemporary art epitomizes this condition. Works are evaluated not for intrinsic merit but for signifiers such as “represented by a major gallery,” “number of followers,” or “auction price.”
 
Here, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory adds a crucial insight. He understood art as a field structured by relations of power, in which “cultural capital” and “symbolic capital” determine legitimacy. The value of a work, therefore, arises less from the work itself than from its position within the field of institutions, critics, galleries, and collectors. What we now witness—brand over work, validation over meaning—is the extreme signification of symbolic capital.
 
Maurizio Lazzarato, in 『Signs and Machines』, described contemporary capitalism as a system that mobilizes signs and desires. Capital no longer simply exploits labor but organizes imagination, signs, and consumer desire to generate new value. Contemporary art sits squarely within this structure. Works function as devices of desire, while social media snapshots and art fair sales exemplify what Lazzarato called the “economy of signs and desires.” From this perspective, art today is less an autonomous act of creation than a sign-machine deployed to organize and channel desire.
 


The Transformation of Exhibitions: From Contemplation to Certification

Exhibitions too have changed character. In Korea, Ron Mueck’s show attracted over half a million visitors in three months, yet the focus of many was not the work’s meaning but the photos they could post online.

Globally, immersive exhibitions such as teamLab and Van Gogh Alive turn art into a consumable experience rather than an occasion for contemplation. Exhibitions become stages for event industries, while artworks are reduced to backgrounds for image consumption. Such transformations reinforce art’s subordination to the order of sign capitalism.


 
The Structure of Distortion

This inversion has multiple causes.

First, in late capitalism, art has been financialized into a tradable asset, subject to graphs of rising and falling prices.

Second, digital transformation and social media fragment works into images, compressing viewing time into instant consumption.

Third, institutional authority has weakened. Where once criticism and public museums provided criteria for value, they now rely increasingly on box-office metrics and public sentiment. Art loses the ground to stand on its own, collapsing into an inessential apparatus governed by external indicators.
 


The Question of Value Production

Who, then, is the true producer of value? The artist, the public, the institutions, or capital? Today, value production is distributed. In Korea, entry into an art fair often carries more weight than a museum exhibition. Globally, collectors, institutions, and even algorithms wield greater influence than artists themselves. But this pluralization of value leads to a dilution of essence. Works mean less as works in themselves than as signs circulating within networks. This is precisely the intersection of what Bourdieu called the monopolistic force of symbolic capital and what Lazzarato described as the machinery of desire.
 


Alternative: Reconstructing Trust

We cannot simply accept this as an inevitable paradigm of our time. It is a distortion in which essence is overshadowed by the inessential. The alternative lies in reconstructing trust. Of course, we cannot return nostalgically to the past ideals of autonomy and the sublime. Instead, new structures of trust must be built. Criticism must once again provide public language, museums and institutions must resist surrendering entirely to market logic, and art must be anchored in communal values, ethical practices, and sustainability.


 
Conclusion: Returning to the Existential Question

The “age of role reversal” is not a passing phenomenon but the name of an existential crisis facing contemporary art. In both Korea and the world, art still retains its essence, but that essence is being devoured by the structure of sign capitalism. In Bourdieu’s terms, the art field is dominated by the monopolization of symbolic capital; in Lazzarato’s, art has been reduced to a sign-machine for the organization of desire.

The question we must now grasp is clear: For what does art exist? Without sustained reflection and an answer to this, contemporary art will remain lost in the noise of markets and images. Only by holding fast to this question, and by rethinking essence itself, can we prepare to move beyond the age of role reversal.

Jay Jongho Kim graduated from the Department of Art Theory at Hongik University and earned his master's degree in Art Planning from the same university. From 1996 to 2006, he worked as a curator at Gallery Seomi, planning director at CAIS Gallery, head of the curatorial research team at Art Center Nabi, director at Gallery Hyundai, and curator at Gana New York. From 2008 to 2017, he served as the executive director of Doosan Gallery Seoul & New York and Doosan Residency New York, introducing Korean contemporary artists to the local scene in New York. After returning to Korea in 2017, he worked as an art consultant, conducting art education, collection consulting, and various art projects. In 2021, he founded A Project Company and is currently running the platforms K-ARTNOW.COM and K-ARTIST.COM, which aim to promote Korean contemporary art on the global stage.