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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.
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