活动预告｜另一个艺术世界
10月29日下午2点，我们荣幸地邀请到了艺术家、作家、策展人妮卡·杜布罗夫斯基（Nika Dubrovsky）来到中间美术馆，分享自己作为艺术家的创作，以及其丈夫大卫·格雷伯（David Graeber）未尽的事业。文末附有妮卡与大卫共同撰写的文章，大家可提前了解讲座内容。本次活动将由艺术史学者、策展人、中间美术馆馆长卢迎华主持，欢迎感兴趣的朋友扫描下方的二维码报名。
We are honored to welcome the artist, writer, and curator Nika Dubrovsky to Inside-Out Art Museum. She will pressent her work as an artist and the unfinished career of her hunsband, the anthropologist David Graeber, at 2pm October 29. We've enclosed below Nika's eponymous essay, Another Art World, co-written with David, as a reference to the event. The event will be moderated by Carol Yinghua Lu, the art historian, curator and director of Inside-Out Art Museum. Please scan the QR code below to register for the event.
活动
日程
Schedule
10月29日（周日）
October 29 (Sunday)
14:00-16:00
主讲人：妮卡·杜布罗夫斯基
Speaker: Nika Dubrovsky
主持人：卢迎华
Moderator: Carol Yinghua Lu
地点：中间美术馆会议室
Venue: Conference room, Inside-Out Art Museum
语言：中文、英文（现场配有翻译）
Languages: Chinese, English (interpreting on site)
预约入口
Please scan the QR code for reservation
嘉宾介绍
Speaker
妮卡·杜布罗夫斯基
Nika Dubrovsky
妮卡·杜布罗夫斯基是一位艺术家，同时也是一系列书籍的作者，她称它们为“视觉散文”，这些书经过了多种语言的翻译。她的文章则发表于《e-flux》《Artnet》《ArtReview》与其他出版物上。目前，她正致力于完成“......与众不同”系列丛书（麻省理工学院出版社，2024年），本书由妮卡与她的丈夫、已故的活动家与人类学家大卫·格雷伯（David Graeber）合作编写。妮卡还是“关怀博物馆”这项开源计划的策展人，参与大卫·格雷伯研究所的工作。
Nika Dubrovsky is an artist and an author of books which she calls "visual essays." Dubrovsky's books have been translated into several languages. Her texts were published in e-flux, Artnet, ArtReview and other publications. She is currently working on the book series "...made differently" (MIT 2024), which she co-authored with her late husband David Graeber, an activist and anthropologist. Nika is also the curator at the open-source initiative "Museum of Care" and is involved in the David Graeber Institute.
主持人介绍
Moderator
卢迎华
Carol Yinghua Lu
艺术史学者、策展人，现任北京中间美术馆馆长。她于2020年获墨尔本大学艺术史博士学位，曾出任深圳OCAT艺术总监及首席策展人（2012-2015）；意大利博尔扎诺Museion的客座策展人（2013）与亚洲艺术文献库中国研究员（2005-2007）。她曾担任第九届光州双年展联合策展人、第七届深圳雕塑双年展联合策展人（2012）。她是美国艺术史研究机构协会（ARIAH）首届“东亚学者奖”的四位获奖者之一（2017），获Yishu华人当代艺术评论奖（2016）和泰特美术馆研究中心亚太计划的首个特邀研究学者奖金（2013）。2013年至今，她与艺术家刘鼎持续开展题为“社会主义现实主义的回响”的研究，对叙述中国当代艺术的视角和方法论进行重新评估，他们也是第八届横滨三年展的艺术总监。
卢迎华曾担任全球艺术界多个重要奖项的评委，包括Hyundai Blue Prize青年策展奖（2022、2021）、蔡冠深基金会当代艺术奖（2022、2021）、东京当代艺术奖（2019-2022）、集美·阿尔勒国际摄影艺术季发现奖（2020）、Hugo Boss亚洲新锐艺术家大奖与Rolex劳力士创艺推荐资助计划（2019）、威尼斯建筑双年展菲律宾国家馆（2018）、基辅平丘克艺术中心的未来世代艺术奖（2012）与威尼斯双年展金狮奖（2011）等。
Carol Yinghua Lu is an art historian and a curator. She received her Phd degree in art history from the University of Melbourne in 2020. She is the director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. She was the artistic director and senior curator of OCAT, Shenzhen (2012-2015), guest curator at Museion, Bolzano (2013) and the China researcher for Asia Art Archive (2005-2007). She was a recipient of the ARIAH (Association of Research Institute in Art History) East Asia Fellowship (2017), Yishu Awards for Critical Writing and Curating on Contemporary Chinese Art (2016) and visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship Program at the Tate Research Centre (2013). She was the co-artistic director of Gwangju Biennale and the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012).
She has served as a juror for important awards in the global art world, including the Hyundai Blue Prize Youth Curatorial Award (2022, 2021), the Cai Guanshen Foundation Contemporary Art Prize (2022, 2021), the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (2019-2022), the Discovery Prize for the Jimei-Arlès International Photography Art Season (2020), the Hugo Boss Asia Emerging Artist Award and Rolex Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative (2019), the Philippine National Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), the Future Generation Art Award at the Pinchuk Art Center in Kyiv (2012), and the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale (2011).
2019年9月，大卫·格雷伯与妮卡共同撰写了《另一个艺术世界》，文章分为三个篇目，分别是《艺术共产主义与人为稀缺》《作为市场价值的自由乌托邦》《治安与象征性秩序》。我们经过妮卡的授权，节选、翻译并发布第二篇目的前两个小节，这些段落讨论了艺术与生产的关系以及艺术世界的现状。
David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky completed the essay, Another Art World, in September 2019. The article is divided into three parts, "Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity", "Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value", and "Policing and Symbolic Order". We have been authorized by Nika to excerpt, translate and publish the first two chapters of Part II, passages that discuss the relationship between art and production and the current state of the art world.
作为市场价值的
自由乌托邦
Please scroll down for English
无限的生产循环
浪漫主义遗产绝没有从当代艺术的世界中消失——它只是保留了最精英主义的元素。我们仍然崇拜个人天才，无论是疯狂、饱受折磨的天才还是其他的天才；任何如下明确的信念被清除了：我们都是从艺术家开始，并且可以在一个根除各种形式的制度性暴力的未来社会中再次成为艺术家。结果，曾经驱动各种前卫的自由概念已经开始规范商品化的逻辑——甚至更重要的是，它鼓励我们将商品化的逻辑视为自由本身的定义。
在本文的前一部分中，我们回顾了俄罗斯革命先锋派想象的“未来人”（布代特良人）不仅将从那些扼杀他们创造力的不公平和恶意的社会条件中解放出来，他们还将享受一种近乎孩子般的自由。这是对原始浪漫主义概念的直接调用，它与“文化”概念本身一起诞生，明确地表达了对商品化逻辑的反应。
要弄清楚这一切是如何扭转的，需要做大量的工作，但在我们看来，关键是回到孔德和圣西门对工业主义的关注。当然，浪漫主义观念中的艺术家是孤立的天才，大约与工业革命同时出现。这几乎可以肯定不是巧合。正如法国社会学家阿兰·迦耶（Alain Caillé）所言，艺术天才最好被视为对工厂体系的一种结构性补充。
实际上，工匠或工匠的以往形象一分为二。消费者面临着两种不同类型的商品：一方面，源源不断的消费品，由一群不知名的产业工人生产，消费者对他们的个人传记一无所知（通常甚至不知道他们生活在哪个国家，他们所说的语言，无论他们是男人、女人还是孩子）；另一方面，独特的艺术作品，其生产者、消费者绝对了解一切，其传记是物品本身价值的内在组成部分。
但如果艺术家的英雄形象只是工业主义的镜子，这肯定有助于解释为什么这个形象对圣西门或马克思（他在学生时代就尝试过德国浪漫主义诗歌）等社会主义者如此有吸引力。它并没有解释为什么这个形象仍然存在于我们身边。毕竟，我们生活在这样一个时代，资本主义越来越多地围绕护理工作而不是工业劳动的管理来组织，更多的是关于人、事物和环境的维持、维护、培育、教育和修复，而不是创造。自然环境。甚至阶级斗争的主要场所也集中在护士、清洁工、教师和各种护理人员身上。
确实，艺术家越来越不像产业工人，而越来越像管理者。但尽管如此，他们仍然是英雄的、高度个性化的管理者——也就是说，是成功的管理者（较小的人物现在很大程度上被降级为艺术上相当于护理工作的人）。它说明了这一点，无论其他因素可能发生什么变化，也无论艺术家的浪漫主义观念现在在我们看来是多么陈腐、愚蠢和早已被遗弃的；无论有多少关于艺术团体的讨论；在像威尼斯双年展或当代艺术博物馆这样的展览中，几乎所有的东西仍然被视为来自某个特定个体的大脑。也许一百件中就有一件是例外。无论作品的实际创作环境如何，都是如此。如今，我们可能太敏感了，无法称这些人为“天才”。但艺术世界的整个机制毫无意义，除非它最终是非常类似于过去所谓的天才的东西——某种不可言喻的、精神的、创造性的、植根于个人灵魂的东西——创造了它所推崇的价值。即使是当代艺术界对推广特定弱势群体、伊拉克移民、拉丁裔酷儿等艺术家的作品的迷恋也与此完美契合。它似乎标志着某种东西的回归，至少更像是集体文化创造力的旧观念，因为艺术家被视为他们诞生的创意背景的代表，但最终，它只是消解了横向浪漫主义回到垂直状态，因为任何特定艺术品的价值仍被视为源于艺术家完全个人的传记，而传记很快就呈现出完全属于自己的轨迹与逻辑。
（很容易理解为什么会出现这种情况。否则的话，就意味着酷儿艺术家或有色人种艺术家在某种程度上比异性恋白人艺术家对自己的作品更少地承担个人责任。这显然是偏执或种族主义的。唯一的选择是将后者主要视为其文化环境的产物，而这正是艺术界拒绝做的。）
事实上，每个人都知道这一点，并且许多人声称反对，但这并没有使它变得不那么真实。事实上，这只是揭示了克服这个习惯是多么困难。因为自工业革命以来，绝大多数艺术品都保持原样，只有与某些独特的个人灵魂相关时才被视为有意义。一个不围绕特定个体的创造性愿景组织起来的艺术世界根本就不是一个“艺术世界”。
那么，工业门类和工业时代思维模式的影响力为何挥之不去呢？在我们看来，最终的原因在于我们无法脱离“生产”的概念。
我们似乎仍然痴迷于“工作必然是制造东西”的观念；最好是通过一个既神秘又至少有点不愉快的过程。例如，为什么聪明的人类经常坚持认为富裕国家不再存在“工人阶级”，仅仅是因为没有多少人受雇于工厂——就好像开出租车、安装电缆、在生病时为人们更换便盆的人都是机器人或训练有素的猴子一样？为什么我们首先将工作等同于“生产”，而不是照管事物、维护它们或移动它们？
这种思维习惯比浪漫主义要深刻得多。它是非常特殊的神学传统的产物。犹太教、基督教、伊斯兰教的上帝从无到有地创造了世界（事实上，他从无到有地创造了宇宙，这有点不寻常；大多数神都是利用现有的材料）；人类的处境，正如伊甸园的故事或普罗米修斯所明确的那样，是惩罚：那些违背造物主并试图扮演上帝的人被诅咒要继续这样做，为自己的生存创造手段，但这样做也是一种痛苦和磨难。亚当被诅咒要靠额头上的汗水来种植粮食。夏娃同时被告知，上帝会加倍她“劳动”（in labor）时的痛苦，即分娩时的痛苦。
我们可以考虑一下这个类比。“生产”孩子的真正过程（如果你真的想用这个词的话）不仅仅涉及性行为和九个月的怀孕，还涉及一个社会关系网，涉及多年的养育、支持、教育……但在这里整个过程消失了，坍缩到一个婴儿看起来（尤其是男性旁观者看来）刚刚出现、完全成型的那一刻，通过一个神秘但痛苦的过程突然出现——就像宇宙一样。这就是“生产”的典型范例，这个词的字面意思是“产生”，甚至是“推出”。工厂一直被认为是最终的黑箱，一个充满痛苦和磨难的神秘场所，里面有钢铁、碟子、或者微芯片以某种方式完全形成，通过一个我们永远不会真正知道并且宁愿不去思考的过程。但在古典观念中，艺术家的大脑也是如此。
从这个角度来看，工厂工人和艺术天才都必须受苦才有意义。他们只是以相反（但互补）的方式受苦。工厂工人受苦是因为他与自己的工作异化了，工作对他来说毫无意义，而且他无法控制它；艺术家，因为她无可救药地陷入其中，永远无法挣脱。
显然，随着工厂劳动力重要性的下降和金融资本的主导地位，工作主要是生产东西的观念（而不是清洁、移动、维护、培育、修理、改造或照顾它们）变得越来越难以维护。但在这种背景下，艺术家实际上扮演着越来越重要的战略角色。艺术仍然被认为是一个具有无穷生产力的工厂，艺术仍然被视为以某种方式直接从艺术家的大脑中通过痛苦而神秘的过程突然出现。或者说，随着艺术界正处于“创意产业”的顶端，所有这些都巧妙地表明，越来越多的行政人员和官僚确实以某种方式正在“生产”一些东西，或者说一些不同于艺术世界自身等级结构的各种社会组织的东西。
艺术世界的进与出
每一个展览、每一个新的双年展或卡塞尔文献展，都努力（并且不可避免地声称）成为一次历史性事件。历史事件——至少按照一种定义（我们喜欢的定义）——正是那些在发生之前无法预测的事件。因此，每一次艺术活动都旨在给观众带来惊喜。有些东西必须在形式上是新的，必须包括一些以前不被认为适合“当代艺术”类别的东西，或者更好的是，它根本不被认为是一种艺术。如今，从民族志物品、民间艺术到社会实践与项目设计的描述，展览的内容无论包括什么，都被认为是正常的。艺术世界不断地测试和放弃它的界限。
在某种程度上，这就是艺术世界实际上已经变成的样子：不断地测试和克服自身的界限。因此，它似乎总是朝着过去先锋派预见的方向前进，打破自己的泡沫，以最终包容一切。但它真的能成功自爆吗？它真的在努力吗？几年前，当有人问鲍里斯·格罗伊斯（Boris Groys），始终处于危机之中的艺术界是否真的处于自我毁灭的边缘时，格罗伊斯回答说：“我没有看到任何崩溃的迹象。在世界范围内，工业博物馆建筑群正在不断增长。文化旅游的步伐正在加快，每周都有新的双年展和展览在各地开幕。最近仅中国的加入就极大地扩大了艺术世界的规模。”
所谓的艺术世界很大程度上是由对规则的无休止的猜测组成的，这些规则总是在变化和谈判中。没有人声称对这些问题负责，每个人都声称他们只是想弄清楚这些问题。它变得更加复杂，因为暴露、挑战或打破规则现在已经成为艺术本身的主要内容。
顺便说一句，这种通过一场壮观的违反规则的表演来为那些重新校准、重新分配和重新评估规则的人创造更高薪作品的游戏不仅限于艺术界。它日益成为政治本身的基本内容。考虑英国脱欧。虽然表现为民众愤怒的爆发和对行政精英的彻底反感，但从英国退欧中受益最大的人群显然将是律师，他们现在将拥有数以千计的英镑。他们花了一个小时的时间重新评估英国过去四十多年来签订的几乎所有合同协议。从很多方面来说，它都是我们这个时代的寓言。
尽管如此，总有元规则，如果我们可以这样称呼它们的话：关于哪些类型或规则可以被打破或不能被打破的规则。也许确定这些的最好方法是确定什么是明显无效的举动。例如，人们经常听到这样的话：如今，没有什么东西不能变成艺术作品——哪怕只是因为争论某物是否是艺术的行为本身就倾向于将其构成为艺术作品。但这并不是真的。有些东西是无法变成艺术品的。正如我们从威尼斯双年展中了解到的那样，可以挖掘一艘在地中海溺水的难民船并将其展出，有些人会同意这是一种艺术姿态。但难民本身，或者他们淹死的大海，则完全是另一回事。
总是有限制存在。
这就是为什么我们相信个人创意天才的形象如此重要。尽管我们可能否认这一点，但它仍然在规范游戏规则方面发挥着作用。换句话说：继续拥抱浪漫主义理想的一半是以绝对排斥另一半为前提的。如果说有一条绝对的规则，一条不能逾越的红线，那就是不是每个人都可以成为艺术家。艺术创造的价值必然建立在排斥的基础上。要真正实现诺瓦利斯（或者奥西普·布里克，甚至约瑟夫·博伊斯）的愿景，就意味着要消解构成“艺术世界”的整个结构，因为这会破坏其创造价值所凭借的整个机制。
正如我们指出，这不仅仅是因为任何市场都必须按照稀缺原则运作，某种精神天才的概念似乎是证明一个充斥着金融化衍生品利润的市场所需要的稀缺性水平的唯一途径。自工业革命以来，艺术世界一直基于“真正的艺术”是无价且稀有的理念；前卫艺术对这一原则的挑战被吸收和恢复的方式是，它的定义也在不断变化和不稳定。但事实上，这种情况完全有利于艺术品市场的当前参与者，就像市场波动有利于债券交易员一样：艺术品价值的快速变化，艺术家新名字的发现带来了新的获利机会，特别是对于那些对规则将如何改变有一定了解的内幕交易者来说（在许多情况下，因为他们自己参与了规则的改变） 。这就是画廊主和策展人工作的基本内容。价格飙升、概念革命、新发现、艺术家、画廊、策展人、评论家之间不断的角斗冲突——所有这些结合起来提出了一个微妙的论点：金融市场的特有逻辑、创造性破坏、自我营销的结合与思辨，就是自由，确实是最精致的精神层面上的自由。毕竟，如果不令人兴奋，那就没什么了不起。感觉就像是一场任何事情都会发生的游戏。但商业世界的金融化高峰往往也是如此。正如在商业世界中一样，所有这一切只有在绝对无法挑战的、未说明的背景下才可能实现，这些背景最终是排斥结构。
Utopia of Freedom
as a Market Value
The Endless Cycle of Production
The Romantic legacy has by no means disappeared from the contemporary art world-it's just retained only its most elitist elements. We still worship the individual genius, mad, tortured, or otherwise; what has been purged is any explicit belief that we all begin as artists, and could, in a future society in which forms of institutional violence are rooted out, become artists once again. As a result, that very conception of freedom that once drove the various avant-gardes has come to regulate a logic of commoditization-or even more, it has encouraged us to see that logic of commoditization as the definition of freedom itself.
In the previous installment of this essay, we recalled that the Russian revolutionary avant-garde imagined "people of the future" (Budetlyans) would not only to be liberated from those unfair and malicious social conditions that stifled their creativity, they would also enjoy a kind of almost childlike freedom. This was a direct invocation of the original Romantic conception, born together with the concept of "culture" itself, one explicitly formulated in reaction to the logic of commoditization.
It would take a great deal of work to unravel how all this turned around, but the key, it seems to us, is to return to Comte and Saint-Simon's focus on industrialism. The Romantic conception of the artist as isolated genius emerged, of course, at roughly the same time as the Industrial Revolution. This was almost certainly no coincidence. As French sociologist Alain Caillé has suggested, the artistic genius might best be conceived as a kind of structural complement to the factory system.
In effect, the older figure of the craftsman or artisan split in two. Consumers were confronted with two different sorts of commodity: on the one hand, an endless outpouring of consumer goods, produced by a faceless mass of industrial workers, about whose individual biographies consumers knew absolutely nothing (often, not even what countries they lived in, languages they spoke, whether they were men, women, or children…); on the other, unique works of art, about whose producers, the consumer knew absolutely everything, and whose biographies were an intrinsic part of the value of the objects themselves.
But if the heroic figure of the artist is simply the mirror of industrialism, this would certainly help explain why that figure was so appealing to socialists like Saint-Simon, or Marx (who in his student years tried his hand at German Romantic poetry). It does not explain why this figure is still with us. After all, we live in an age when capitalism is more and more organized around the management not of industrial labor but care work, less about the creation than about the sustaining, maintaining, nurturance, education, and repair of people, things, and the natural environment. Even the main loci of class struggle centers on nurses, cleaners, teachers, and care workers of various sorts.
True, artists too less and less resemble industrial workers, and more and more resemble managers. But they are still heroic, highly individualized managers nonetheless-that is, the successful ones (the lesser figures are now relegated largely to the artistic equivalent of care work). And it's telling that, whatever else may change, and however much the Romantic conception of the artist now seems to us trite, silly, and long-since-abandoned; however much discussion for that matter there is about artistic collectives; at a show like the Venice Biennale, or a museum of contemporary art, almost everything is still treated as if it springs from the brain of a specific named individual. Perhaps one piece in a hundred is an exception. And this is true no matter what the circumstances of a work's actual creation. We may be too delicate nowadays to call these individuals "geniuses". But the entire apparatus of the art world makes no sense unless it's ultimately something very like what used to be called genius-something ineffable, spiritual, creative, and rooted in the individual soul-which creates the value that it celebrates. Even the fascination of the contemporary art scene with promoting works by artists identified with specific disadvantaged groups, Iraqi migrants, queer Latinas, and so forth, is perfectly apiece with this; it might seem to mark a return to something at least a little more like the older idea of collective, cultural creativity, since the artists are being valued as representatives of the creative context from which they emerged, but ultimately, it simply dissolves that horizontal Romanticism back into vertical, heroic Romanticism again, since the value of any given artwork is still seen to derive from the artists entirely individual biography, which quickly takes on a logic and trajectory entirely its own.
(It's easy to see why this would have to be the case. To do otherwise would be to suggest that queer artists, or artists of colour, are somehow less individually responsible for their works than straight white ones. That would be obviously bigoted or racist. The only alternative would be to treat the latter primarily as products of their cultural environment, which is precisely what the art world refuses to do.)
The fact that everyone knows this, and many claim to object, does not make it any less true. Really, it just reveals how difficult this habit is to overcome. Because the overwhelming majority of artworks remain as they have always been, since the Industrial Revolution, seen as making sense only in relation to some unique individual soul. An art world that was not organized around the creative vision of named individuals simply would not be an "art world" at all.
Why then the lingering power of industrial categories and industrial-age modes of thought? The ultimate reason, it seems to us, lies in our inability to detach ourselves from the notion of "production".
We still seem obsessed with the notion that work is necessarily a matter of making things; preferably, through a process that is simultaneously mysterious, and at least a little bit unpleasant. Why, for example, do otherwise intelligent human beings so often insist that the "working class" no longer exists in wealthy countries, simply because not many people are employed in factories-as if it were somehow cyborgs or trained monkeys who were driving their taxis, installing their cable, or changing their bedpans when they're sick? Why do we identify work with "production" in the first place, rather than tending to things, maintaining them, or moving them around
This habit of thought goes far deeper than Romanticism. It is the product of a very particular theological tradition. The Judaeo-Christian-Islamic God created the world out of nothing (He is in fact somewhat unusual in having created the universe out of nothing; most work with existing materials); the human condition, as the story of the Garden of Eden or for that matter Prometheus make clear, is punishment: those who disobeyed the Creator and tried to play God are cursed to continue to do exactly that, to create the means for their own existence, but to do so in a way that is also a form of pain and suffering. Adam is cursed to grow food by the sweat of his brow. Eve is simultaneously told that God will multiply her pains "in labor"-that is, in giving birth.
We might consider this analogy for a moment. The real process of "producing" children (if you really want to use that word) involves not just an act of sex and nine months of pregnancy, but a web of social relations involving years of nurture, support, education… Yet here that entire process disappears, collapsed into the one moment when a baby seems (especially to male onlookers) to just appear, fully formed, through a mysterious but painful process out of nowhere-much like the universe. This is the very paradigm of "production", a word which literally means "to bring forth" or even "push out". The factory was always conceived as the ultimate black box, a mysterious place of pain and suffering, where steel, saucers, or microchips somehow pop out fully formed through a process we'll never really know and would rather prefer not to have to think about. But so, in the classical conception, is the artist’s brain.
In this light, it only makes sense that both the factory worker and the artistic genius must suffer. They simply suffer in opposite (yet complementary) ways. The factory worker suffers because he's alienated from his work, it means nothing to him, and he has no control over it; the artist, because she's hopelessly entangled in it and will never be able to break free.
Obviously, with the decline of the importance of factory labor, and the predominance of finance capital, the notion that work is primarily a matter of producing things (instead of cleaning, moving, maintaining, nurturing, fixing, transforming, or caring for them) becomes ever more difficult to maintain. But in this context, the artist actually plays an increasingly strategic role. Art is still conceived as a factory of endless productivity, and art is still seen as somehow popping, through a painful yet mysterious process, directly from the artist's brain. And with the art world sitting as it does at the peak of the "creative industries", all this works to subtly suggest that the administrators and bureaucrats who increasingly make it up really are somehow "producing" something after all-or, something other than the various social tissues of the hierarchical structures of the art world itself.
The Art World In and Out
Each exhibition, each new biennial or Documenta, strives (and inevitably claims) to be an historic event. Historical events are-by one definition at least (the one we like)-precisely those events that could not have been predicted before they happened. Every artistic event thus sets out to surprise its audience. Something must be formally new, something must be included that was not previously considered to fit in the category of "contemporary art", or even better, that was not considered to be an art at all. It's considered normal, nowadays, for exhibitions to include anything from ethnographic objects and folk art to the description of social practices or items of design. The art world constantly tests and waives its boundaries.
To some degree this is what the art world has actually become: the constant testing and overcoming of its own boundaries. As a result it always appears to be moving in the direction foreseen by past avant-gardes, bursting its own bubble in order to ultimately encompass everything. But can it really succeed in blowing itself up? Is it even really trying? When a few years ago someone asked Boris Groys whether the art world, always in crisis, was really on the verge of self-destruction, Groys answered: "I do not see any signs of collapse. Worldwide, the industrial museum complex is growing. The pace of cultural tourism is increasing, new biennials and exhibitions are opening everywhere on a weekly basis. The recent addition of China alone has drastically increased the size of the art world."
Much of what is called the art world consists of an endless speculation on the rules, which are always in flux and under negotiation. No one claims to be responsible for them, everyone claims they are just trying to figure them out. It becomes all the more complicated because exposing, challenging, or breaking the rules is now the main substance of art itself.
This game of making a spectacular show of violating the rules, so as to create even more highly paid work for those who recalibrate, redistribute, and reevaluate them, is hardly limited to the art world, incidentally. Increasingly, it is the basic substance of politics itself. Consider Brexit. While presented as an outburst of popular rage, of burn-it-all-down revulsion against administrative elites, the class of people who are going to benefit the most from Brexit will obviously be lawyers, who will now have untold thousands of thousand-pound-an-hour work thrown at them reevaluating pretty much every contractual agreement the UK has entered into for the last forty-odd years. In many ways it stands as a parable for our times.
Still, there are always meta-rules, if we can call them that: rules about what sort or rules can and can't be broken. Perhaps the best way to determine these is to determine what's clearly an invalid move. It's commonplace to hear, for example, that there's nothing, nowadays, that cannot be turned into a work of art-if only because the very act of arguing about whether or not something is art will itself tend to constitute it as such. But this isn't really true. Some things can't be turned into works of art. It is, as we've learned from the Venice Biennale, possible to dredge of a ship in which refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean and place it on display, and some will agree that this is an artistic gesture. But the refugees themselves, or the ocean in which they drowned, are quite another matter.
There are always limits.
This is why we believe the image of the individual creative genius is so important. Deny it though we might, it continues to play a role in regulating the rules of the game. To put it another way: the continued embrace of one half of the Romantic ideal is premised on the absolute exclusion of the other one. If there's one absolute rule, one red line that cannot be crossed, it is that everyone cannot be an artist. The kind of value art creates must, necessarily, be based on exclusion. To actually realize the vision of Novalis (or for that matter Osip Brik, or even Joseph Beuys) would mean to dissolve away the entire structure which makes "the art world" what it is, because it would destroy the entire mechanism through which it creates value.
This is not just because any market must, as we note, operate on a principle of scarcity, and some sort of conception of spiritual genius seems the only way to justify the levels of scarcity that a market pumped quite so full of the profits of financialized derivatives requires. The art world has, since the Industrial Revolution, always been based on the idea that "real art" is priceless and rare; the way the avant-garde challenge to this principle has been absorbed and recuperated has been to add to this that its definition is also constantly shifting and unstable. But this situation is in fact altogether favorable to the current players of the art market in the same way that market volatility is favorable to bond traders: the rapidly changing values of art objects, the discovery of the new names of artists allow for ever-new opportunities for profit, and especially for the insider traders who have some advance knowledge of how the rules are about to change (in many cases, because they are involved in changing them themselves). This is what the work of gallerists and curators is basically about. The price spikes, the conceptual revolutions, the new discoveries, the constant gladiatorial clashes between artists, galleries, curators, critics—all combine to propose a subtle argument: that the characteristic logic of financial markets, the combination of creative destruction, self-marketing, and speculation, is freedom, indeed, freedom on the most refined spiritual level. After all, it is nothing if not exhilerating. It feels like a game where anything goes. But so, often, does the financialized peaks of the business world; and just as in the business world, all this is only possible against the unstated background of that which absolutely cannot be challenged, which are ultimately, structures of exclusion.
海报设计：孙岳
编辑：朱雅楠
翻译：陈静怡 / 朱雅楠
校对：李若虹
正在展出 What's On
北京中间美术馆
Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum
意义
Meaning
中间艺术基金会赵文量与杨雨澍艺术中心
Zhao Wenliang & Yang Yushu Art Centre
教我如何不想她——赵文量绘画中的“母亲”
How Can I Rid My Mind of Her: "Mother" in Zhao Wenliang's Paintings