Capitalist prizefighters striking the plasticity of art
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the dialectics of plasticity at the intersection of art, boxing, and political ecology. It focuses on the visuality of Black male boxers in Jean-Michel Basquiat oeuvre. I explore how Basquiat viewed the struggle of artistic expression (art’s plasticity) as akin to prizefighting. I draw from the critical aesthetic maneuvers of the French theorist Georges Bataille, and the realist painter Gustave Courbet in order to show how art’s plasticity rivals the political ecology of global capitalism, by tracing a common root between economy and ancient martial arts. I consider the recent boxing match between heavyweight champion Oleksander Usyk and former champion, Tyson Fury as a capitalist spectacle of sacrifice and consumption that serves as a form of ‘sportwashing’. The article culminates with an exegesis on prizefighting in relation to the concept of extinction, one of the marker horizons of the global oil economy. While the connection between prizefighting, extinction and war may not seem obvious, I reference the financial alliances animating the global media apparatus that underpins the visibility of today’s martial arts. The article is organized in 12 rounds, with each round encompassing a particular move or strategy of striking (with art).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it