In other words: there aren’t any artists who don’t hustle. Amerika is simply more rigorous about this situation than most. He refuses to pretend that the hustle is somehow extraneous to the work. On the contrary, he incorporates the hustle into the work directly. Indeed, he makes it the very point of the work’s formal self-reflection. In this sense, PHON:E:ME is Adorno’s nightmare. The formal techniques of modernism were supposed to create a critical distance between the artist and the world, and between the spectator and the spectacle. But Amerika uses these very same techniques to show that there is no distance. In the postmodern world, the network is everything. Everything is beautifully and hideously interconnected.
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