Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Thinking about art in terms of the effects of a given work and its reception as raising the credit of some and lowering it of others might provide interesting ways of examining even the minutest formal features of the work (and I don’t just mean the art market here). And asking someone whose credit they are harming and whose they are propping up might cut through a lot of noise and hypocrisy of discussions of ethics and morality. Credit is the monetization of debt and succeeds previous forms of expressing obligation like honor—it is only when the central bank (or, maybe, a more decentralized banking system outside of direct political control) replaces the general “pointman” that we have a credit order. But credit is part of the long history of debt, which is the history of humanity, beginning with our debt to the central being on the originary scene. Already in Zack Baker and mine “There is no Economy But Only the Debt to the Center” a complete reframing of human intentionality in terms of indebtedness is proposed. A debt to David Graeber is evident here, but also a kind of calling in of his anarchist “chips,” since his entire critique depends upon the assumption of an originary free community where, presumably, each exchange leaves no imprint on subsequent ones (we’d have to imagine no one remembers anything—memory, or commemoration, is itself a recording of debt).”

— Adam Katz, Credit and Succession · Aug 31, 2025 · Bouvard Substack