Sina Najafi
Ten Enemas for Contemporary Art
Ten Enemas for Contemporary Art
1. Ban the word "contemporary". It has no philosophical basis and discourages a historical perspective. 2. Make all artworks and art criticism anonymous. This suggestion, adapted from Foucault, counters the fact that "a name makes reading too easy". (1) Art will be changed as dramatically as banning inheritance would change the world. 3. Force every piece of art criticism to begin by answering this question: "On whose behalf and for whose benefit is this text being written?" As Boris Groys has outlined, the art critic today is a homeless figure who has abandoned the "public" but not been accepted by the artist. Art criticism today is written in order not to be read. (2) Address this situation explicitly. 4. Ban reviews from any art magazines that accept gallery advertising. Breaking the collusion between advertising and reviews requires this drastic measure. 5. Impose an artificial limit of $10,000 for production expenses on all art projects for four years. What was once an interesting question of scale in art has now become a mere question of size. Stop the supersizing of art. 6. Place a moratorium on all biennials for a period of at least four years. Also, no more books and shows purporting to round up "the best" of this and that. 7. Prevent anyone below the age of 30 from exhibiting. Take seriously Nietzsche's warning that the artists today suffer from being exhibited or published before they can mature. A few precocious artists will suffer from this policy but the benefits will outweigh the losses. 8. Require every critic to make an artwork a year, and every artist to write a piece of art criticism a year. 9. Shut down all branches of museums. The proliferation of such spaces promotes belief in a beast called "international contemporary art". The brand name museum now creates the brand name artist to burn as fuel for its own mission. (3) 10. Force every potential art buyer to submit an essay that argues for why he or she deserves to own the particular piece of work. These anonymous applications will be reviewed by the artist to select the buyer. ........................... (1) Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher", in: Lawrence Kritzman, ed. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984 (New York & London: Routledge, 1988). (2) Boris Groys, "Critical Reflections", Artforum, October 1997. (3) See Carl Skelton, "Guggenheimlichkeit", in Cabinet, issue 4 (2001). Sina Najafi New York |
