metropolis m

To recapitulate before attempting a provisional conclusion to this six-part series of columns: in his famous, and frankly rather bizarrely argued essay from 1964 of the same title Arthur Danto defined ‘The Artworld’ as ‘an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art.’ This atmosphere, as per Danto, is the last instance to issue aesthetic guarantees: when a work of art can be anything, the art world and its agents have the purpose to legitimise and judge art created in the present. 

The term stuck, as obvious power narratives do. It smacks of sociology (the art world as incarnated by existing institutions and professionals) while it hides its metaphysics (how the art world can bring art into being). More than half a century later, this at the same time nebulous and compact term is still academically valid, also in disciplines outside of art history such as anthropology, and it has bled into the mainstream to become an everyday reference to the field or system of art. But those terms are more abstract than the ‘art world’, and lack the latter’s propensity for siting and identifying power. However, in spite of its universalising influence on the conceptualisation of art, the term and its linguistic and analytical effects remain largely unchallenged and un-investigated; an investigation that would go beyond the supposed referential stability of the term.

As theorist Kim West asks: Was the quattrocento an art world? Can the Parisian salons be understood as such? Why is contemporary art under the sway of the term? Or, to extend this argument, how about Malevich’s suprematist art school in Vitebsk, where young people were trained to create objectless images for a world at war; subtractive protocols for a world already ridden by negativity and loss? This was art that asked ‘what world is this?’ and pitted it against art’s own worldlessness. As readily as the term comes to us today, as much is it out of key with such art historical settings that, ironically, have enormously influenced the symbolic order of contemporary art. 

On its side, today ‘contemporary art’ refers to an entity versioned during the nineties, the decade that forgot it was part of the twentieth century, at a time when neoliberalism in many respects sent the world (as a whole) off the rails. The prevailing institutionality of art (its discursive habits, its public spheres, its relation to the political economy, et cetera) is in many ways no older than this. We need analyses sensitive to change and time. For one reason, because the dominant neoliberal scheme of valuation naturalises a pervasive economification of society that must be an aspect of the continuing success of the term ‘art world’. In this light the rich interiority associated with the word ‘world’ has a colonial ring: it is a resource, a gold coast. But worlds can also be barren and doomed.

The art world – the term as well as any material reality it may be able to denote – tends to make everything around it pseudo, cynical and trite. This includes discourses that negate it, because they typically do so with no less essentialist demands for authenticity and presence. It is a word that reduces confusion, but in a bad way. It brings play to a halt, along with the ability to create other worlds, or not-yet-existing non-worlds. It is one of those words that put a handle on subjectivities and phenomena, and those are not the words we need. In our age of extinction not only natural diversity is vanishing, also vocabulary and imagination are turned into monocultures. When instrumentalised, words themselves can turn against language. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world: Wittgenstein’s old motto still applies.

How can an exhibition be a ‘dissenting space’ (Judith Barry) under the symbolic superstructure of the art world? Does the notion reflect concepts of art and exhibitions in a non-western context? How can one ‘unlearn’ the art world (Gayatri Spivak), if this is what is required? If the art concept’s radicalism consists in what we at any given moment can imagine art to be, then how can sociology of art be set to work in parallel with art’s inherent not-yet-being? And what sociology could we summon for such a task? 

The perspectives of sociology and imagination seem incompatible, and yet absolutely necessary to combine in some way. To articulate the art concept between the two would not be a form of institutional critique in any conventional sense. When institutions under neoliberalism have increasingly become controlling (of flows) rather than regulating (of symbolic content), it is unclear what type of institutionality you criticize. Any claim of epistemic authority over art must be countered by the conviction that there is no theory outside of art that can save it – and yet art is always folded into its socius. Art is that which is not yet a thing; neither certain knowledge nor something identifiable. We need words that open up art’s continuous, future-directed creation of its not-yet-being.

Lars Bang Larsen

is curator bij Moderna Museet, Stockholm