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When critics and curators question the art world’s relevance, call for its democratization, or – as my colleague Tirdad Zolghadr did in a talk recently – its ‘demystification and de-glamorization’, they do so with the intention to improve our profession’s working conditions and make audiences’ encounters with art meaningful. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I would argue that without its inequality, glamour and mystery, there would not be much left of the art world. To put it bluntly, there is no point to make a better art world if we fail to consider how we formulate and evaluate professional agency in the first place. Symptomatically this concerns how the notion of ‘the art world’ acts in language by affecting desire and intelligence in the symbolic reproduction of art. Before we worry about the decadence of ‘the art world’, we should be concerned about the corrupting force of the term itself. 

Its power is in no small part due to the elasticity with which it reaches across everyday language and academic jargon. A utilitarian term, it teeters always on the verge – or on the wrong side of – instrumentalization. Art historian Pamela M. Lee’s Forgetting the Art World (2012) employs it in the historical context of our globalized world. Her book consists for the main part of substantial essays on Thomas Hirschhorn, Takashi Murakami, and Andreas Gursky, whose work Lee considers as both objects and agents of globalization. As the title of her book suggests, she couches these monographic efforts in a discussion of the art world, which she approaches through the distance inherent to the term: Lee argues that Arthur Danto’s foundational writing on the art world from the sixties identified ‘a virtual space of both discursive and sociological separation, premised on a peculiar sense of distance, at once metaphorical and actual’. In this way, wrote Danto in reference to Saint Augustine, ‘the art world stands to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands to the earthly city’. A striking metaphor that introduces a metaphysical motif.  

Under globalization, Lee observes, no centre holds, thereby creating an illegible historical scenario for art. Thus forgetting the art world means forgetting New York and the ‘Eurocentric axis around which the art world historically ground and turned’. A relevant or inevitable self-critique, to be sure, but also an argument that assumes that Western Europe, and New York in particular, once were centres, or the only centre. This may be more or less analytically productive, and more or less hegemonically problematic, depending on how you look at it. To Lee, the art world’s empirical reality consisted in the fact that its activities, operations, and communities were ‘distinct’, ‘singular’, and ‘memorable’ in the past. Under globalization, however, this uni-verse is ‘escalating and accelerating’ beyond meaningfulness, while being undermined by global media’s culture of the image. 

To Lee, the art world continues to be a historically and analytically useful notion, even as the term has become inflated. This inflation results in a hyperspace of networked power, exemplified by the ‘biennalization’ of contemporary art – the ‘mounting irrelevance’ of biennials and their collusion with ‘neoliberal denial’. Today, half a decade after the publication of her book, it seems necessary to revisit this critique of the biennials and art history’s approach to the system of which they are part, in order to at least reconsider critical exceptions to Lee’s rule of biennial sameness and the ‘utter continuity’ she sees between the art work and the world it at once inhabits and creates. (Lee’s position could for instance be compared to Caroline Jones’ more optimistic view of a ‘critical globalism’ in her book The Global Work of Art. World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience from 2017.)

In other words, Lee’s account of the art world is no project of active, Nietzschean forgetting. She sets about forgetting (the global simulacrum of) the art world, but still insists on Danto’s definition of it as a crux for meaningful analysis of contemporary art. This insistence on keeping intact the term’s referential power, and a certain historical innocence on its part, seems to prevent an exposure of the imperialism that it has always enacted on the art concept. Once again the term escapes an interrogation of its wordliness and ambiguous force, the devious naturalism through which we think we know what it means and by which it receives our projections.

I would argue that the notion of the art world fundamentally denotes art’s lack. In the art world you will never find your place, because your psycho-social desire for what it presumably is, or for what it positively should not be, is already mixed up in the very idea of it. Similarly, the art world will never find its place in this world, nor productively locate the work of art, because the term’s metaphysical toning produces distance and separation. If an art scene is where art’s agents appear, the art world is where art disappears. Here its larger cultural context vanishes, along with the potential for the thinking of art, because it denotes art’s already socialized setting: when the endless potential suggested by ‘world’ is equated with the given processes of socialization, the end of art is always near. Perhaps if we explore the term’s ambiguity, and our own ambivalence towards what we believe it to represent, critique can find a way. Art must be given an outside – linguistic, epistemological, political, imaginary, and so on – to prevent its collapse in solipsism.

Lars Bang Larsen

is curator bij Moderna Museet, Stockholm