Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
EconoIllic Role of
the Art Exhibition
Dorothea von Hantelmann
Dorothea von Hantelmann, “On the Socio-‐Economic Role of the Art Exhibition,”
in Juan Gaitán, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Monika Szewczyk, eds., Cornerstones.
Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and Sternberg Press, 2011:
266–277.
Fig. 90
Robert Morris, Bodyspacemotionthings,
1971/2009.
I
.-',
On the occasion of his participation in documenta V (directed by
Harald Szeemann) in 1972, the artist Daniel Buren wrote a statement
for'the exhibition catalogue in which he claimed that "More and
more the subject of an exhibition tends not to be the display of art
works, but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art."l Buren
was reacting against what he saw as a tendency among curators to
assume an authorial role in the presentation of artworks-a tendency
arguably spearheaded by Szeemann himself-recognizing that this
would eventually reverse the relationship between the artwork and
the exhibition, where the latter would have to be acknowledged as the
actual work of art. Consequently, Buren proposed a work that put
the focus on precisely this situation: instead of simply adding another
piece to the exhibition, he chose an already existing curated room
with paintings by artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, and
Brice Marden, and covered the walls beneath the paintings with
striped wallpaper. Under the title Exhibition of an Exhibition, Buren
presented a work that not only dissolved the hierarchy between the
artwork and its environmental support, thereby producing a certain
bafflement in the viewer as to the actual location of the work of art
the paintings, the wall, or the entire situation-he also pointed out
the extent to which this entire situation determines or co-determines
the experience and the meaning of any artwork.
Since then much has been said about the growing promi
nence of curators and the question of their status as organizers or
authors of exhibitions. Similar attention has been drawn towards the
increasing number of museum buildings constructed in the last fif
teen years and the financial and architectural efforts that go into their
realization. There have been many discussions around phenomena
such as Britain's Tate Modern and the enthusiasm shown by the public,
critics, and tourists alike at attempts to present high art to a mass
audience of four million visitors a year, including the question of what
to make of this remarkable popularity-a popularity, however, which
is not limited to this kind of signature building. Today, art institutions
which a few decades ago attracted only a handful of visitors on open
ing nights, receive hundreds of people, not to mention the crowds
that flock to see blockbuster exhibitions and shows like documenta.
The art world has not only expanded globally-as demonstrated by
the numerous new. biennials, art fairs, and museums that have been
founded all over the world-it has also expanded socially. A London
journalist recently called art lithe social lubricant of our great city,"2
Daniel Buren, MAusstellung einer Ausstellung: Nick Foulkes, 'Why Art is the Social Lubricant
in Daniel Buren, Achtungl Texte 1967-1991, of our Great City: London Evening Standard,
eds. Gerti Fietzek and Gudrun Inboden [Dresden July 10, 2 009 ,
The recent success of the visual arts is certainly linked to a rather new
notion of art, nurtured in part by the accomplishments of Conceptual
art. It is partly due to the latter's instantiation of a freedom of means,
that is to say, its self-deliverance from the mandatory bond of art
with painting and sculpture. It is also due to Conceptual art's conse
quent achievement in broadening art's frame of reference, to include,
paraphrasing Dan Graham, the entire social context. The contesta
tion of an aesthetic definition of art in favor of an alliance with fields
of cultural, social, and political experimentation has substantially
changed what Thierry de Duve calls the IIsocial contract" of art,
meaning the conventions, rules, and expectations that structure art's
relation to a public. The contemporary art exhibition has become a
sort of meeting place for different kinds of specialized discourses. As
such, it is specialized in the sense that it produces a specific meaning
or knowledge, yet at the same time it is (or at least it claims to be) ex
pected to be accessible to a general public-unlike the university, for
instance, which is not required to open its discourse to a broader
public. Attaining this combination of specificity and openness might
be the biggest challenge for producers and mediators of art today.
However, above and beyond the individual artwork, I would
like to contend that it is the format of the exhibition itself that is one
of the key factors in the recent success of the visual arts. Indeed, as
I see it, this recent popularity is the continuation of a success story that
already spans two centuries: the increasing dominance of a fairly
modern ritual that is specific to democratic market societies, the ex
hibition. From their inception, at the turn of the nineteenth century,
both the museum and the exhibition have become distinguishing
features of the modern bourgeois state. They served as an emblem for
the emergence of an important set of relations through which a
democratic citizenry has not only been rhetorically incorporated into
the processes of the state but could also perforinatively practice or
enact a set of values that were and still are fundamental to Western
democratic societies, namely (a) the instantiation of a linear notion of
time, (b) the increased valorization of the individual, (c) the import
ance of the production of material objects, and (d) the latter's sub
sequent circulation through commerce.
See Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum
Evolution, Museums, Colonialism ILondon and ILondon and New York: Routledge, 1995i.
New York: Routledge, 200lji. Particularly, 'Part I I I: Technologies of
Progress:
See Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Quoted in Tony Bennett, The Birth of the
Public Art Museums iLondon and New York: Museum, 102.
Routledge, 19951.
Ibid.
According to this line of thought, the art exhibition is the place where
these basic values and parameters are cultivated and performed in
their respective relation-as they have to be constantly enacted and
reenacted, performed and re-performed in order to become and to
remain effective. The way in which this takes place, however-how
the exhibition ritual and, with it, the specific subject-object relation
at its core, is shaped-is subject to historical changes. Without
being able to cover this in the frame of an essay, I will sketch this his
torical perspective by pointing to two significant moments in the
history of exhibitions: first, the historical emergence of exhibitions in
rising bourgeois industrial societies, and second, their profound trans
formation along with socioeconomic changes in the second half of
the twentieth century. In both cases, I believe that there are striking
correspondences between a societal and economical order on the one
hand and its respective exhibition format on the other.
10
See Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure
History, Technology, Art(Palo Alto, CA: Class (New York: Mentor Books, 19531.
Stanford UniverSity Press, 19991.
II 12
See Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, an Ethico For a detailed account see Jon Bird, "Minding
Aesthetic Paradigm [Bloomington and Indiana the Body: Robert Morris's 1971 Tate Gallery
polis: Indiana University Press, 19951, 20 . Retrospective,· in Rewriting Conceptual Art,
ed. Michael Newman [London: Reaktion Books,
19991.
13 15
Reyner Banham, "It was SRO-And a Disaster," Tony Bennett, "Civic Laboratories: Museums.
New York Times, May 23, 197L 028. Cultural Objecthood, and the Governance of
the Social," Cultural Studies 19, no. 5 (2005):
14 521-47.
Ibid.
16 17
See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New For a detailed account see Schulze, Die
Modernity [London: Sage, 19921; Gerhard Erlebnisgese/lschaft.
Schulze, Die Erlebnisgese/lschaft:
Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart [Frankfurt am
Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 19971.
I argued that the recent success of the visual arts cannot be explained
solely by a booming market or simply be condemned as being part
of the ever-growing sphere of spectacle. It also-and to a larger extent
than is the case in current debates on art-has to be understood as
the success of the exhibition format itself. Subsequently, I suggested
that this exhibition format owes its success to a set of values funda-
18