on the possibility of critique

It is a favor bestowed on very few realms of contemporary life to have added to its name the suffix “world” — permanently and without qualification, not even demurring with a hyphen! The world-like quality of the artworld is supposed to derive more from the sense of its sphericity, its closedness, than from the usual characteristic of world, that it contains everything there is. There was a time when everything that could be called art certainly did not belong to the artworld. There was art and there was the sphere that commercialized and promoted one definition of what it was to be art, although some would claim that that happy epoch is over, and today it has taken on a totalizing gesture, no longer defining itself by what it will not absorb, but rather by its ability to absorb all non-art as well. From the perspective of the artworld there is nothing that is not art or potential art.

To be more precise, the process by which a thing comes to be accepted as art has been inverted. The concept “art,” which formerly received its determination in principle from non-art (not-yet or no-longer art), now bestows legitimacy by its own grace. That is to say, the principle of art was in essence plastic and receptive, a principle of and from experience, and not a law, which could shape experience from without. Art was judged by its capacity to redefine itself on the basis of non-art. It was all eyes, on the lookout for that very thing that would topple its hegemony and take away its legitimacy as a concept and an institution. This constitutes the excitement of art history. Yet it would not be enough to say that now, for well-known economic and social reasons, the institutions decide, for artists and artworks are complicit in the decision to totalize the world of art, by ceding power to it in advance. Nevertheless, art itself has not been redefined. It is still the loose and maleable principle, the true material of artists, that arises from the extremes of a plurality of artworks like smoke from an exposion.

Like our own world, the artworld has an ecology. It produces waste. Artists become wasted and diminished, and as refuse, their refusal to join the art world becomes the engine by which the ship of art chugs into the next phase of its domination. Brooklyn, in other words, is already Manhattan, while Manhattan has become the junkyard of the artworld.

This is why the boats made out of refuse that are now steaming toward the Venice Biennale, in order to gradnly display their refusal of the artworld’s claim to totality, will not make a dent in its defenses, insofar as they already act as its outermost ramparts. Garbage, dissent, a pugnacious stance against the committee-system that sights the next horizon — all these the artist self-named “Swoon” dismisses (read about her act here: http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/57181/). Swoon as she might, she won’t make the watery art city quiver. It has already seen her ship coming and included the sea within its boundaries. What she and her crew have not yet understood is that, to shrink the artworld back to the size of a comet, they need to become more exclusive, not less, to make active, meaningful decisions on the nature of art neither by committee nor anti-committee, but instead by making artworks that disregard the dialectic of refusal and acceptance.