Art and the Challenge of Markets Volume 2 by Victoria D. Alexander Samuli Hägg Simo Häyrynen & Erkki Sevänen

Author:Victoria D. Alexander, Samuli Hägg, Simo Häyrynen & Erkki Sevänen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

A Plea for Responsible Art

Here we are, at the foot of an insurmountable peak. Can one, must one still try to judge Contemporary Art ? Can one do it outside of the polemics it sustains to keep up the good times it enjoys, which are as lively as they are pointless? Is it trying to soil its own sacred autonomy ? Are we stuck between the absolute autonomy , which Art has managed to acquire, forbidding us from appreciating it without going through its own strict requirements, and the general, external analyses, which treat Art as an objectless, social ritual, or a speculative game based on arbitrary values (in both cases, treating the artworks with indifference)?9 Judging means quite the opposite—it means distinguishing the difference. But in the name of what? Once again, our initial question reemerges, that of the evaluation criteria Modern Art has so well criticized for the past century that they have all been completely abolished. If Art is not just produced by a market of signs, it is not just the product of work and risky commitment either. It is also a product that cannot be reduced to its producers—it is something that stands alone and imposes its own course. I think that far from bringing forth a paralysis of judgment, or the suspension of the right to noncomplicit, insolent criticism, this state of things has made such a critique more necessary than ever.

It is time I remind the reader of my incompetence, not as a Sociologist refusing to take sides in the name of his status, but simply as a personal admission. At this point, I can only share a lesson taken from my work on taste, the practices of “amateurs” and music lovers, all activities incessantly taken up, and redefined by the unexpected interventions of things themselves, of groups, of emerging sensibilities (Hennion 2007, 2010). The pragmatist perspective is already a kind of answer: knowing what Art is, what it is worth, cannot be proclaimed as a proper definition, whether it comes from the artists themselves, the critic, or the philosopher. Especially if the issues at stake are not clear, nor given beforehand, knowing this must be the result of an independent investigation, as independent as the artist must be to produce it. It must also involve experimentation. Realism in a narrow sense of the term (i.e., exclusive consideration of what seems to be present) is often confused with Empiricism as it is understood to be: an exclusive judgment of the real, based on the effects it has. If a short-sighted realism is blind to Art’s as yet indefinable future, an open Empiricism offers a lot of space for this: facing up to disrespectful, unpredictable, heterogeneous obstacles, which impose a binding rapport on the public. Not “the public” in the restricted, fixed, “realist” sense which measures attendance at museums, auctions at Christie’s and so on, but in the stronger sense afforded to the term by pragmatists, denoting the republic or a shared space: a

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