April 17th, 2010
“The close relation existing today between the museum and the art market reveals pressures from our society. Ever since our culture subscribed willingly to historicity as well as to the principle of marketing, it has ceased to classify the museum’s difference from the market. The museum consecrates commodities that are simultaneously traded at the art fair. Institutions and events help in where art as such no longer appears to be convincing on its own terms. Enforced mediation is called for to support the former prestige of a weakened art. For a variety of reasons, society depends on a culture of privilege and is therefore determined to give art credit whether it deserves it or not.”
Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, p.98
“Our concept of art is rooted in that of the Enlightenment age, which credited it with a timeless and universal significance transcending the specificity of individual works or genres: art was declared timeless and universal, much as human rights themselves were meant to apply to all people, however different they might be in race and origin. But this idea of art was tenable only when phrased in a general art history. The view of art history was needed to frame the individual time of the works since art history had a universal validity, while the individual works did not. That is why the art museum was to become the spatial equivalent of the time scheme of art history. It offered a place for everything capable of representing the logic of art history, which, when the Louvre first opened, was only old art, while new art first had to earn the status of museum art — it had to wait for it.
“The nervous debate over the recognition of today’s art proves clearly the degree to which we still cling to an idea not older than two hundred years — regardless of the age (or the youth) of the works of art to which we apply this idea. This idea of art history as still ongoing links us to the great tradition of historical culture, since we fear nothing more than art becoming a notion of the past. The definition even of contemporary art ultimately needs the horizon of history, as it is this history that helps to explain what is, in essence, inexplicable. But art enjoys a privilege that mere ideas can never obtain: it materializes in ‘a work of art’ that can be acquired by a museum and exhibited there as ‘art’, that is, in a work that always possesses a place and a name. Even if it is a fiction, as Marcel Duchamp suspected, it is still a necessary fiction for the purpose of exhibiting culture, though market values seem to dominate as a result of present practices in art commerce. Even if the market insists on the purchase price and the museum proclaims art as its property, it is still only the symbolic value that can engage our fascination for art.”
Ibid., p.105
...since we fear nothing more than art becoming a notion of the past…
We may indeed fear art becoming a notion of the past. And yet, it seems as though the belief, more - the experience, of an object embodying real force, call it spiritual force, call it numinous, call it powerful, call it whatever works for you — but somehow embodying an actual energetic force that somehow gives form to human meaning — to depths and heights of human existence — that relate to soul, consciousness, guts, heart — call it whatever you want but it has to do with something essential about being human — that this belief and experience is clearly on the wane in our culture and art no longer necessarily means that, if it ever did.
Which brings up the question - where is it then, exactly, that we are headed?