Art Power

the city per se possesses an intrinsically utopian dimension by virtue or being situated outside the natural order. p101

The quest for utopia forces the city into a permanent process of surpassing and destroying itself.p101

Today, when we cease to be satisfied with the life that is offered to us in our own city, we no longer strive to change, revolutionaize, or rebuild it; instead, we simply move to another city. p102

Romantic tourist

The romantic tourist is not in search of universal utopian models but of cultural differences and local identities. His gaze directed not at the future but at past provenance.p113

The touristic gaze romanticizes, monumentalizes, and ternalizes everything that comes within its range. In turn, the city adapts to this materialized topia, to the medusan gaze of the romantic tourist. p103

It was tourism that created these monuments. It is tourism that monumentalizes a city.p103

...The residents sense the need to assimilate the globalized gaze pointed at them and to adjust their own way of life to the aesthetic predilections of their visitors. p105

Post-romantic tourism

Rather than the individual romantic tourist, it is instead all manner of people, things, signs, and images drawn from all kinds of local cultures that are now leaving their places of origin and undertaking journeys around the world. p105

Cities are no longer waiting for the arrival of the toursit --they too are starting to join global circulation.p105

World City

all cities now increasingly resemble one another and are beginning to homogenize, with the result that when a tourist arrives in a new city he ends up seeing the same things he encountered in all the other cities. p105

...much of what one witnesses there as "authentically Chinese" has long been familiar to visitors from America or Europe, where such Chinese attributes can be found in any town or city. p106

This world city operates like a reproductive machine that relatively swiftly multiplies any local attribute of one particular city in all other cities around the world. p106

Art in the age of Tourist Reproduction

We are now prepared to be attracted and persuaded particularly by artistic strategies capable of producing art that achieves the same degree of success regardless of the cultural context and conditions in which it is viewed. p107

What especially impresses us about all things, customs, and practices is their capacity for reproduction, dissemination, self-preservation, and survival under the most diverse local conditions. p107

As a consequence of total tourism we are now witnessing the emergence of a homogeneity bereft of all universality, an utterly new and up-to-date development. p108

The curator may exhibit, but he doesn't have the magical abilitity to transform nonart into art through the act of display. That power, according to current cultural conventions, belongs to the artist alone.(43)

The question is then, why have curators lost the power to create art through the act of its exhibition, and why has this power passed over to artists? The answer is obvious : In exhibting a urinal, Duchamp does not devalue a sacred icon, as the museum curators had done; he rather upgrades a mass-produced objcet to an artwork.(44)

Over the yearsmodern artists began to assert the total autonomy of art - and not just from its sacred prehistory, but from art history as well - because every integration of an image into a story, every appropriation of it as illustration for a particular narrative, is iconoclastic, even if the troy is that of a triumph of this image, its transfiguration, or its glorification. Acoording to tradition of modern art, an image must speak for itself; it must immediately convince the spectator, standing in sllent contemplation, of its own value. The conditions in which the work is exhibited should be reduced to white walls and good lighting. Theoretical and narrative discourse is a distraction, and must stop. Even affirmative discourse and favorable display were regarded as distoring the message of the artwork itself. As a result : Even after Duchamp the act of exhibiting any object as an artwork remained ambivalent, that is, partially iconophile, partially iconoclastic.(44-45)

A work of art cannot in fact present itself by virtue of its own definition and force the viewer into contemplation; it lacks the necessary vitality, energy, and health. Artworks seem to be genuinely sick and helpless - the spectator has to be led to the artwork, as hospital workers might take a visitor to see a bedridden patient. It is in fact no coincidence that the word "curator" is etymologically related to "cure". Curating is curing.(46)

The art work needs external help, it needs an exhibition and curator to become visible.(46)

By placing an artwork in a controlled environment, in the context of other carefully chosen objects, and above all involving it in a specific narrative, the curator is making an iconoclastic gesture.(47)

We see artworks as incarnating art. The famous distinction between art and non-art is generally understood as a distinction between objects inhabited and animated by art and those from which art is absent. This is how works of art become art's idols, that is analogously to religious images, which are also believed to be inhabited or animated by gods.(49)

Such documentation, however, merely refers to art without itself being art. This type of documentation is often presented in the framework of an art installation for the purpose of narrating a certain project or action. Instead they become documents, illustrations of the story told by the installation. One could say that today's art audience increasingly encounters art documentation, which provides information about the aertwork itself, be it art project or art cation, but which in doing so only confirms the absence of the artwork.(49)

On the one hand, images in the museum are aestheticized and transformed into art; on the other, they are downgraded to illustrations of art history and therby dispossessed of their art status.(51)

This double abuse of images, this doubled iconoclastic gesture, is only recently being made explicit, because instead of narrating the canon of art history, independent curators are beginning to tell each otehr their own contradictory stories. In addition, these stories are being tole by means of temporary exhibitions (which carry their own time limitations), and recorded by incomplete and frequently even incomprehensible documentation. The exhibtion catalog for a curatorial project that already presents a double abuse can only produce a further abuse. Images don't merge into the clearing of Being on their own accord, where their original visibility is then muddied by the "arr business," as Heidegger describes it in The Origin of the Worf of Art. It is far more than this very abuse makes them visible.(51-52)

Modern art operated not only as a machine of inclusion of everything that was not regarded as art before its emergence but also as a machine of exclusion of everything that imitated already existing art patterns in a naive, unrefl ective, unsophisticated—nonpolemical—manner, and also of everything that was not somehow controversial, provocative, challenging. But this means: The fi eld of modern art is not a pluralistic fi eld but a f i eld strictly structured according to the logic of contradiction . It is a fi eld where every thesis is supposed to be confronted with its antithesis.

Already Malevich said that he was struggling against the sincerity of the artist. And Broodthaers said—when he started to do art—that he wanted to do something insincere. To be insincere means in this context to make art beyond all taste—even beyond one’s own taste.

But the artistic embodiment of self-contradiction, of paradox, began to be especially practiced in contemporary art after World War II. At this point we are confronted with paintings that could be described as both realistic and abstract at the same time (Gerhard Richter), or objects that can be described as both traditional sculptures and as readymades at the same time (Fischli/Weiss), to mention just a few examples.

Being one-sided and aggressive is, of course, at least as modern as being moderate and seeking to maintain the balance of power.

Art functions as commodity or political propaganda? he devides it into two categories.

After the end of World War II and especially after the change of regime in the former Socialist Eastern European countries, the commercial system of art production and distribution dominated the political system. The notion of art became almost synonymous with the notion of the art market, so that the art produced under the nonmarket conditions was de facto excluded from the fi eld of institutionally recognized art.