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Europe and Its Others
Even the art fairs, which are primarily there for buyers, are transforming more
and more into events in urban space that attract people who do not wish to
be buyers. In our time the art system is well on its way to becoming part of
the very mass culture that for so long it wanted to observe and analyze from
a distance. And it is becoming part of mass culture not as the production of
individual objects that are traded on the art market but as an exhibition praxis
that combines architecture, design, and fashion—just as the guiding intellectual
figures of the avant-garde, such as the artists from Bauhaus, Vkhutemas,
and others had predicted as early as the 1920s and 1930s. But does that mean
that art today has become completely identical with mass culture and has
completely lost its ability to transcend its boundaries and thus to reflect on
itself
I do not believe so. Mass culture—or let’s call it entertainment—has a
dimension that is often overlooked but is extremely relevant to the problems
of otherness or alienness. Mass culture addresses everyone simultaneously. A
pop concert or film screening creates communities of viewers. These communities
are transitory; their members do not know one another; their composition
is arbitrary; it remains unclear where all these people came from and
where they are going; they have little or nothing to say to one another; they
lack a shared identity, a common prehistory that could have produced
common memories they could share—and despite all that they are communities.
These communities recall the communities of those traveling on a train
or airplane. To put it another way, they are radically contemporary communities—much
more contemporary than religious communities, political communities,
or labor collectives. All those traditional communities emerged
historically and presume that their members are linked to one another from
the outset by something that derives from their shared past—a shared language,
a shared faith, a shared political belief, a shared education that enables
them to do a certain job. Such communities always have specific boundaries—and
they close themselves off from all those with whom they have no
shared past.
Mass culture, by contrast, creates communities irrespective of any
shared past—communities with no preconditions, communities of a new
type. This is the source of their enormous potential for modernization, which
is so often overlooked. But mass culture itself is usually not capable of reflecting
on and developing this potential fully, because the communities it creates
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