TEXTBIOBIBLIO

Mikkel Bolt
An (im)possible future



If art gives anything it can be nothing more than the future. I am not even sure that art actually gives anything. Art is not able to deliver the past, no one is. But in the fragile offering of art, something might happen. Something is going to happen. Something that will never exhaust itself in any preordained destiny, but will rest an offer of something to come.

The question of the future of art is not to be posed though. Why? Because we are in no situation to make any claims whatsoever concerning neither art nor the future.(1) Perhaps we think more or less discreetly to ourselves, perhaps the uncertainty of "the future of art" is today so great, so indeterminate, that we do not even need to raise the question. As Valéry wrote: "The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."

But we could find support and directions concerning the future of art again - could we and ought we not skip the need for support and directions? - in the fact that art was able to signal, several years ago, the hopefully coming ethical turn in the Western and North-American public spheres after the terrible terrorist attack on the 11th of September 2001. Because was it not art that returned to the question of the possibility of a different planetary order in exhibitions like the Whitney Biennale in 1993 and showed that the adversity of world-politics and the world-economy should be placed at the forefront of any serious artistic, philosophical or scientific endeavour again. Since then, we have seen a multiplicity of artistic practices engaged in the exposition of our common-being in the world. We now realise that although we might be alienated, this should not lead us to search for some origin or stable ground from which to proceed. All we can do is to be affirmative towards this void; and work - work in such a way that "work" stops being the work that culminated in Auschwitz and Kolyma - towards another scenario in which global politics is not left to the initiative of the strong. This means for us creating a world which is not already enshrined in a destiny nor entirely still to do. This endeavour art will surely play a part that is all we know about the future of art.

Mikkel Bolt
Aarhus

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1) editors' note: sharing this consideration, the editors worried about the initiative website question and modified it, asking for a yet unknown art.