Table Of ContentArt Power
Art Power
Boris Groys
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2008 Boris Groys
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gro˘ıs, Boris.
Art power / Boris Groys.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-262-07292-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Art—Political aspects. 2. Art and state. 3. Art, Modern—20th century—Philosophy.
I. Title.
N72.P6G76 2008
701′.03—dc22 2007020844
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction 1 Part II
Art at War 121
Part I
The Hero’s Body: Adolf Hitler’s Art
The Logic of Equal Aesthetic
Theory 131
Rights 13
Educating the Masses: Socialist Realist
On the New 23
Art 141
On the Curatorship 43
Beyond Diversity: Cultural Studies and Its
Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Post-Communist Other 149
Artwork to Art Documentation 53
Privatizations, or Artifi cial Paradises of
Iconoclasm as an Artistic Device: Post-Communism 165
Iconoclastic Strategies in Film 67
Europe and Its Others 173
From Image to Image File—and Back:
Art in the Age of Digitalization 83 Notes 183
Multiple Authorship 93 Sources 189
The City in the Age of Touristic
Reproduction 101
Critical Refl ections 111
Introduction
The fi rst thing one learns by reading the majority of texts on modern and
contemporary art is this: both modern and—even to a greater extent—
contemporary art are radically pluralistic. This fact seems to preclude once
and for all the possibility of writing on modern art as a specifi c phenomenon,
as a result of the collective work of several generations of artists, curators,
and theoreticians—for example, in the same manner in which one would
write on Renaissance or Baroque art. At the same time it also precludes the
description of any particular modern artwork (and here by modern art I also
mean contemporary art) as exemplary of the whole of modern art. Every such
attempt can be immediately confronted with a counterexample. So the
art theoretician seems to be condemned from the beginning to narrow his or
her fi eld of interest and to concentrate on specifi c art movements, schools,
and trends, or, even better, on the work of individual artists. The assertion
that modern art escapes any generalization is the only generalization that is
still allowed. There are nothing but differences as far as the eye can see.
So one must make a choice, take sides, be committed—and accept the inevi-
tability of being accused of one-sidedness, of merely advertising for one’s
favorite artists at the expense of others with the goal of advancing their com-
mercial success on the art market. In other words: The alleged pluralism of
modern and contemporary art makes any discourse on it ultimately futile and
frustrating. This fact alone is reason enough to put the dogma of pluralism
in question.
Of course, it is true that every modern art movement has provoked a
countermovement, every attempt to formulate a theoretical defi nition of art
has provoked an attempt by the artists to produce an artwork that would
escape this defi nition, and so on. When some artists and art critics found the
true source of art in the subjective self-expression of an individual artist, other
artists and art critics required that art thematize the objective, material condi-
tions of its production and distribution. When some artists insisted on the
autonomy of art, others practiced political engagement. And on a more trivial
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 recog-
nized 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, unrefl ective, unsophisticated—nonpolemical—manner,
and also of everything that was not somehow controversial, provocative, chal-
lenging. But this means: The fi eld of modern art is not a pluralistic fi eld but a
fi eld strictly structured according to the logic of contradiction. It is a fi eld 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 infi nitely more power-
ful 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 fi nite, political power with images of the infi nite—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 fi rst 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
Introduction
zero as its sum, could only be thought, not seen. But modern art has shown
that is also possible to visualize the zero, the perfect balance of power.
If there is no image that could function as a representation of an infi nite
power, then all images are equal. And, indeed, contemporary art has the
equality of all the images as its telos. But the equality of all images exceeds
the pluralistic, democratic equality of aesthetic taste. There is always an infi -
nite surplus of possible images that do not correspond to any specifi c taste,
be it an individual taste, “high” taste, marginal taste, or the taste of the masses.
Therefore, it is also always possible to refer to this surplus of unwanted,
unliked images—and that is what contemporary art continually does. Already
Malevich said that he was struggling against the sincerity of the artist. And
Broodthaers said—when he started to do art—that he wanted to do some-
thing insincere. To be insincere means in this context to make art beyond all
taste—even beyond one’s own taste. Contemporary art is an excess of taste,
including the pluralistic taste. In this sense it is an excess of pluralistic democ-
racy, an excess of democratic equality. This excess both stabilizes and desta-
bilizes the democratic balance of taste and power at the same time. This
paradox is, actually, what characterizes contemporary art in its totality.
And it is not only the fi eld of art in its totality that can be seen as an
embodiment of paradox. Already in the framework of classical modernity,
but especially in the context of contemporary art, individual artworks began
to be paradox-objects that embody simultaneously thesis and antithesis. Thus
Fountain by Duchamp is artwork and non-artwork at the same time. Also,
Black Square by Malevich is both a mere geometrical fi gure and a painting at
the same time. But the artistic embodiment of self-contradiction, of paradox,
began to be especially practiced in contemporary art after World War II. At
this point we are confronted with paintings that could be described as both
realistic and abstract at the same time (Gerhard Richter), or objects that can
be described as both traditional sculptures and as readymades at the same
time (Fischli/Weiss), to mention just a few examples. We are also confronted
with artworks that aim to be both documentary and fi ctional, and with artistic
interventions that want to be political, in the sense of transcending the
borders of the art system—while at the same time remaining within these
borders. The number of such contradictions and of contemporary artworks
that represent and actually embody these contradictions seems as if it can be
increased at will. These artworks may create the illusion that they invite the
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