Function of art - Guggenheim Bilbao

[Jacques SERRANO]

Function of Art - Function of the Artist
Toward a new status of art 
Conceived by Jacques Serrano, coordination by Stephen
Wright

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO - November, 10th 2005

With the participation of :
Yves Michaud (philosopher), Stephen Wright (art
critic),
Françoise Gaillard (philosopher), Francesco Masci
(philosopher) 
and Alexandre Gurita (artist)

To contact us :
Les Rencontres Place Publique
tél : +33 (0)4 91 90 46 46
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In contexts often far removed from art-specific spaces
and time, the past few years have witnessed the
emergence of a broad range of new practices, which, in
spite of certain affinities and, in some cases, of
undeniable family ties, can only be described as
art-related rather than art-specific activities – and
indeed they lay no claim to art status. In many cases,
these forms of symbolic production, implicitly
questioning and even shattering the borders of art,
actually correspond better to our expectations with
regard to art than those practices upheld and
underwritten by current artistic conventions. The
status of these art-related activities, however, has
never been the object of sustained scrutiny – and they
are usually written off as conceptual leftovers of the
seventies. Even contemporary aesthetic philosophy
tends to summon them as evidence only insofar as they
are predefined as not art – in a hasty endeavor to
again secure and seal off the borderlines of what is
conventionally known as art. 

There is, of course, a context for this shake-up of
the status of art and the artist, bequeathed by the
twentieth century: artistic activity itself is
developing on a massive scale and in a mind-boggling
variety of forms; the production of meaning, form and
knowledge is no longer the exclusive preserve of
professionals of expression. One finds artistic skills
and competencies at work in a variety of areas far
beyond the confines of the symbolic economy of the art
world, and the practices which they inform are in many
cases never designated and domesticated as art. 

 The fact that this sort of art-related creativity
seeks no particular validation from the art world,
that it pays scant heed to the values and conventions
underpinning it, should by no means inhibit us from
charting its genealogy and identifying its inherent
rationality. And yet, aesthetic philosophy, persisting
as it does in construing art as an enigma to be
deciphered, as an object to be interpreted, seems
decidedly ill-equipped to theorize art in this
expanded sense. Beyond both the well-worn logic of
appropriation, consisting of recuperating as art all
description of objects and activities not intended as
such; and beyond the converse, though symmetrical,
logic consisting of recycling artistic practices –
those, in other words, initiated and managed by
artists – outside the sphere of art, and yet on the
basis of the extraterritoriality and reciprocity that
prefigure an unforeseen future for art, it seems
worthwhile to reconsider the status of art today.

Stephen Wright
 


	

	
		
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