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Europe and Its Others
things have been called into question. One can say that European art has
rigorously pursued the path of its own deculturalization. All of the traditional
mechanisms for identifying art that are deeply anchored in European culture
have been critically questioned and declared inadequate. One after another,
waves of the European avant-garde declared to be works of art things that
would not have been identified as such previously. This was not, as many
think, a question of expanding the concept of art. It was not the case that in
the course of the development of art an increasingly more comprehensive,
more universal concept of art was formulated, under which the earlier, partial
concepts of art might have been subsumed. Neither was it about refuting or
overcoming old, supposedly outdated criteria for identifying art, nor about
replacing them with other, new criteria; rather, it was about the diversification,
differentiation, and multiplication of these criteria.
Sometimes a thing was declared a work of art because it was beautiful,
sometimes because it was particularly ugly; sometimes aesthetics played no
role whatever; certain things are in museums because they were original for
or, conversely, typical of their time; because they record important historical
personalities and events, or because their authors refused to depict important
historical personalities and events; because they correspond to popular taste,
or because they reject popular taste; because they were conceived from the
outset as works of art, or because they only became such by being placed in
a museum; because they were particularly expensive, or because they were
particularly cheap, and so on. And in many cases certain works of art are
found in museum collections only because they ended up there by chance,
and today’s curators have neither the right nor the energy to eliminate them.
All of that, and much more, is art for us today. The reasons that we have
available to recognize something as art thus cannot be reduced to a concept.
That is also why European art cannot be clearly differentiated from that of
other cultures. When European museums first began to evolve at the end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, they accepted
works of art of both European and non-European origin—once again on the
basis of the analogies, oppositions, similarities, and differences that connected
all these objects. Our understanding of art is thus determined by the many
rhetorical tropes, by the numerous metaphors and metonymies that are constantly
crossing the boundary between our own and the other, without eliminating
this boundary or deconstructing it. All of the reasons for recognizing
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