HfG Karlsruhe Jahresbericht Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung ...

KW MT
AR MT
100 Prof. Dr. Boris Groys
101
the world are doing every day in the context of their everyday life. Of course, even after the
discourse on the death of the author and the deconstruction of subjectivity and intentionality,
we tend to think that all these operations can be interpreted as art-generating only if they
are originally dictated by an artistic project, by an aesthetic intention – and we also tend to
assume that the masses do not have such an intention, and produce aesthetic effects somehow
“unconsciously”. But today’s masses have become well informed about advanced art production
through biennials, Documenta exhibits and related media coverage – and, yes, they
produce their art intentionally. Contemporary means of communications and networks like
Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life and Twitter give to the global populations the possibility
to post and arrange their photos, videos and texts in a way that cannot be distinguished
from any other post-conceptualist artwork. And contemporary design gives the same
populations the possibility to shape and experience their apartments or work places as artistic
installations. And that means: Today, contemporary art has become a mass cultural practice.
So the question arises: How can a contemporary artist survive this popular success of
contemporary art? Or, how can the artist survive in a world in which everybody has become
an artist, after all?
Pressured by this question, one looks back on the age of modernity with deep nostalgia. In a
time where the cynical political and commercial elites had invaded the world with pseudo-art
to seduce the masses into political obedience and/or consumerist frenzy, the artist could be
proud to produce works of art which, through their very form, signaled resistance to, or ironic
play with, or at least distance from, the dominating mass cultural aesthetics. The modernist
art was elitist. But it was not anti-democratic. The modern age was an arena of a struggle
between two elites – each sought support from the silent democratic majority, each pretended
to be more democratic than the other one. But now we are living not among masses of spectators,
but among masses of artists. The rejection of the dominating aesthetics has now become
an undemocratic gesture, indeed – and, actually, also an impossible gesture. First of all,
to reject the dominating aesthetics of Facebook and YouTube means to reject not art made
for the masses, but art made by the masses. And, secondly, the aesthetics of this mass-produced
art coincides with the most advanced, post-conceptualist aesthetics of contemporary
art itself. Thus, it does not make much sense to start a search for new forms that could be opposed
to the forms of the contemporary democratic popular culture. And it also does not
make much sense to look for strategies of political or ethical engagement, because contemporary
Internet culture already has enough sites to situate these strategies. Both of these
classical Modernist strategies seem to be inefficient in our time. But again: Does it mean that
the contemporary artist cannot survive the mass success of contemporary art? However, the
fact that everybody has become an artist today brings not only a danger but also an opportunity
to the artist’s position in the society. The artistic activity is now something that the artist
shares with his or her public on the common level of everyday life. The artist shares art
with the public as s/he used to share with it religion or politics. To be an artist has ceased to
be an exclusive fate – instead, it has become representative for the society as a whole on its
most intimate, everyday level. Here, the artist again gets a chance to forward a universalist
claim – in an attempt to reveal the inner structure of contemporary everyday life, be it even
an insight in the duplicity and ambiguity of the artist’s own everyday existence.
█ Francis Bacon, Photo
Booth Strip
Aus: / From: David
Sylvester. The Brutality
of Fact. Interviews with
Francis Bacon 1962–
1979, London 2. Aufl. /
2nd Edition 1980.