by Frank Boenders
The diversity and communicability of the arts have never been greater. Thanks to the inexhaustibility of the means of communication, anyone who wants to can connect with everyone else almost instantly. Of course, some branches of the arts, such as literature, are more tightly bound than others to certain, limited language communities. But even the arts today benefit from the great circle-pulling art movements. More and more concerts, performances, exhibitions, meetings, discussions and events are taking place. Such initiatives are animated by an ever-expanding group of organizers. Those who make good use of the countless opportunities for art expansion can count on great interest.
The government, constantly urged to push its support function further, does not dare and will not remain indifferent. Business has discovered in the arts the dream means of vernobulating its image. Promoters of various hues are throwing themselves at art to keep their business going and, it needs to be added, increase their profits. Only a few artists turn their noses up at the rush into which the arts, and thus themselves, have entered. Better art in commotion than art in oppression, is their motto.
More than the other branches of art, that of the visual arts seems to have entered an era of great flowering. Even in the smallest provincial towns, today’s icons hang and stand in galleries and cultural centers, yes even furniture stores and restaurants. Major international and high-profile art events attract hordes of viewers from all over the world. Contemporary art museums have risen from the ground in recent decades. With their astonishing and controversial architecture, they pay tribute to even the poorest products of visual artists.
With that, the gap between the lustrous luxury of the packaging (the building) and the material futility of the content (the art) is also wider than ever today.
The almost massive movement toward museums will not come to a halt any time soon. In the last two decades alone, hundreds of new museums have been built, obviously less to house the huge stockpiles of artworks – after all, it strikes everyone how little is on display – than as social display and political validation. Construction continues unabated, from Paris and Frankfurt in Europe to Atami and Matsumoto in Japan. One does have the general impression, however, that within the walls of all these stunning buildings there is less and less to collect.
Consequently, the audience does not come primarily to elevate itself spiritually with the help of what is on display. It mainly marvels at the audacity and ingenuity of the building. International cultural tourism owes its success not to a supposed flowering of the arts, but to the dexterity of cultural entrepreneurs who manage to lure the movement-minded consumer to museums or artistic events. The rivalry between such cultural managers and art patrons further ensures, that ever larger numbers come to museums.
Many museum directors are doing what curators never used to do. No longer content with their custodial civil service role, in the service of the community and controlled by the community, they now, as stubborn art captains (whether or not in consultation with their international colleagues), chart their own course. Not the artists or art lovers, the museums and their wayward steerers elevate objects to art.
Numerous museum directors also turn out to be downright art dealers. Their double overstepping of duties, in which they set themselves up as promoters (instead of curators) and venders (instead of accountants), points to the misplaced teleological fervor with which they rape the very institution of the museum.
The fairs, where art is traded, have captured a considerable albeit unreliable market share in the international trading world. A specialized press provides continuous information about exhibitions, markets, art books, studios, galleries, museums and – not least – about the artists and the future of the arts themselves. Newspapers and weeklies do not allow themselves to be pushed into a corner when it comes to opinion. They, too, “make” art.
Isn’t it wonderful to see how much there is to do about art? In this hurray, one forgets to ask what art itself is all about. After all, how could visual art still find the peace to come to creation in all this fuss? The “creation” in contemporary art seems much more bewitched by the concept of creation than that it actually creates itself. For the organizers of the visual arts, the speed with which it moves from style to style, from fair to market, from exhibition to manifestation, is proof of its creative capacity. While of course this haste only underscores the hectic nature of the visual arts. True creation implies more than the addition of yet another product to the existing and orderly stock of art objects.
Intrinsic artistic value – separate from commercial value, topicality and event – should be central to creation. If this is not the case, then one is dealing with production. (In passing, it cannot be a coincidence how often the terms production and product crop up in talk of contemporary art.) Production and product are ultimately a matter of supply and demand. The more varied the supply, the greater the public’s interest. The greater the public interest can be driven up, the greater the market share of art products in an economy. But there is a difference between products and art. (Similarly, rituals differ from religion).
Products need have nothing to do with each other. Shoes at a Northern Italian spring fair of shoe manufacturers constitute nothing more than a casual collection, connected, perhaps, by fashion. Art in a museum has to exhibit coherence, or at least demonstrate valid interrelationships. Unfortunately, art in contemporary art museums usually looks like an arbitrary collection of shoes. One can view such collections in the middle of Denmark, the south of France, the heart of the Ruhr, the capital of the Belgian province of East Flanders or a North Brabant light bulb city. Everywhere are collections of art products that at best resemble each other and otherwise refer to nothing. As a rule, they yield only banal encounters. Yet one does not fail to travel further and enter ever newer museums. The hope for something real, for something epiphanic, moves the art consumer to international movement. Doesn’t he always have the buildings to talk endlessly about?
Through the multiplicity of its products, art has today become labor. As one among many forms of production, it produces ever more productive possibilities, entirely in accordance with the internal logic and inner dynamics of the labor process. Today’s art never stands still. Neither do industry and commerce. Unfortunately, from there it never stands still either. The question arises whether one can unquestionably equate the existing flowering of artistic events with the announced flowering of the arts. That restlessness has everything to do with the enormous need for entertainment. The Western form of society, at least for the time being, no longer has to deal with the acquisition of essential material conditions of existence. At the same time, it rejects a worldview foundation. To ease its bad conscience about its unjustifiable material privileges, such a form of society can no longer do without its relentless stream of images. (Without images, one must use one’s imagination – but how can it be set in motion from a groundless void?).
As is well known, the electronic media play the leading role in this continuous distraction process. When Kurdish children’s corpses are buried by broken fathers in an inhospitable mountainside, at best one still reaches for one’s transfer forms. Meanwhile, one effortlessly “forgets” the tragedies of the Lebanese, the Palestinians, the Central Americans, the Cambodians, the Tibetans. Coldly because one is temporarily not fed images about them. Until the information manipulators and the image industrialists wish otherwise.
The visual arts now, precisely to the extent that they too participate (equally manipulated) in this frenetic stream of images, function as extremely welcome instruments in the general anesthetic of conscience. All the more so because they provide the viewer with a sense of spiritual surplus value that he so desperately needs in his crisis of conscience, that he so desperately craves in his ideological vacuum.
At the end of a century of holocausts and world-view demasqué, it is precisely art that is fulfilling the saving role once perceived by religion. Thus, the flowering of the arts events does not fall out of the sky. The apparent flowering of the arts coincides entirely with the illusory but highly functional use the West makes of them.
In order to adequately mask its emptiness, visual art will not so much tap into the heart and imagination as it will seek affiliation with the intellectual currents – eclecticism and postmodemnism – and the intellectualist formalisms that camouflage the gargantuan ethical problems of our time. Completely undermined by the absence of content, visual art seems smoothly absorbed into the prevailing socioeconomic relations. Because it no longer knows what to do, visual art then does what it no longer knows.
In such circumstances, it should come as no surprise that poignancy and beauty and experience are dwarfed. These “obsolete” characteristics of art have given way to a cloaking and fading terminology. “Intuition” and “displacement”: one hears the crunching words, one nods or swallows, one hardly imagines anything bii. What does it matter? What if the experts say so? The more meaningless the words, the better they lend themselves to a charge of frustration and repression. If only the “bloom,” if only the movement of art doesn’t stop!
The visual arts are in dire need of a halt. A tabula rasa may be the only solution. But who has the courage to realize in spirit the desire of the futurists, to set the museums on fire? Standstill, but to do what? Not to do but to think.
Art needs to regain a clear understanding of itself. It can only do that by acquiring, in the same movement of thought, an understanding of what it is not itself. One does not gain understanding of oneself by chasing the understanding of others for oneself, but rather by a calm deliberation in which one assesses as many elements as possible at their right value.
If art needs a sabbatical year for that, then it should allow itself that: after all, the survival of art itself is at stake. In any case, art must stop entering into a dialogue only with itself. Nor should it refer exclusively to its own ups and downs. Art must reconnect to what happens in the world in which it is created. This entry into reality need not necessarily lead to the ephemeral engaged art that was rightly rejected not so long ago as a form of socio-political commentary.
If art truly wishes to discover the world to which it owes its existence, an opportunity for counter-discovery arises. Then the encompassing discovers the most sensitive part of itself. That would first be a hopeful event.
Art is more than a collection of art products. Its own excellence, at least the aesthetic or formal seclusion of the product must be broken. Freed from this narcissism, this sterile self-reflection that never leads to a clear understanding of itself, art can dwell on itself to determine its place in relation to non-art.
The task of art will be to extricate itself from its artificial event paradise and oxygen-poor museum existence. It is clear that neither the museums, to the extent that they actively instigate the contemporary art movement itself, nor art criticism, which, with the same mad kinetics, seeks above all to legitimize itself, can help art in its self-redemption.
Assigned to itself to re-graft itself onto the other: that is the paradoxical task of art before the turn of the century. If it succeeds in unmasking its autonomy as illusory, then Western art still has a future. Otherwise, it is to be feared that, in the midst of its supposed flourishing, it is dying a certain death.