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Introduction
level: When some artists started to make abstract art, other artists began to
be ultra-realistic. So one can say that every modern artwork was conceived
with the goal of contradicting all other modern artworks in one way or
another. But this, of course, does not mean that modern art thereby became
pluralistic, for those artworks that did not contradict others were not recognized
as relevant or truly modern. Modern art operated not only as a machine
of inclusion of everything that was not regarded as art before its emergence
but also as a machine of exclusion of everything that imitated already existing
art patterns in a naive, unreflective, unsophisticated—nonpolemical—manner,
and also of everything that was not somehow controversial, provocative, challenging.
But this means: The field of modern art is not a pluralistic fi eld but a
field strictly structured according to the logic of contradiction. It is a field where
every thesis is supposed to be confronted with its antithesis. In the ideal case
the representation of thesis and antithesis should be perfectly balanced so that
they sum to zero. Modern art is a product of the Enlightenment, and of
enlightened atheism and humanism. The death of God means that there is
no power in the world that could be perceived as being infinitely more powerful
than any other. Thus the atheistic, humanistic, enlightened, modern world
believes in the balance of power—and modern art is an expression of this
belief. The belief in the balance of power has a regulatory character—and
hence modern art has its own power, its own stance: It favors anything that
establishes or maintains the balance of power and tends to exclude or try to
outweigh anything that distorts this balance.
In fact, art always attempted to represent the greatest possible power,
the power that ruled the world in its totality—be it divine or natural power.
Thus, as its representation, art traditionally drew its own authority from this
power. In this sense art has always been directly or indirectly critical because
it confronts finite, political power with images of the infinite—God, nature,
fate, life, death. Now the modern state also proclaims the balance of power
to be its ultimate goal—but, of course, never truly achieves it. So one can say
that modern art in its totality tries to offer an image of the utopian balance
of power that exceeds the imperfect balancing power of the state. Hegel, who
was the first to celebrate the force of the balance of power embodied by the
modern state, believed that in modernity art had become a thing of the past.
That is, he couldn’t imagine that the balance of power could be shown, could
be presented as an image. He believed that the true balance of power, having