85_DO01_Emerling-Preziosi_Buren_Photos-souvenirs au carré 2
Daniel Buren Photos-souvenirs au carré, Lisson Gallery, Londres, 2011. © DB / Sodrac (2015)
Photo : Andrew Meredith

Kunstgriff: Art as Event, Not Commodity

Donald Preziosi
Jae Emerling
85 - Taking a Stance Features Cindy Sherman Daniel Buren
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So here we are again, perhaps a bit more exhausted this time, facing the reduction of art to a mere luxury good precisely at a moment when we most need its uncanny abilities to construct and to express decentred collective experiences. And right now we cannot expect artists to solve this problem. They have become an industry: whether they are pseudo-radicals borrowing from vague political gestures made decades ago as they hawk Hermès scarves (Daniel Buren) or Louis Vuitton bags (Cindy Sherman), or young millionaires — thousands of them — prowling the bloodless spaces of MFA exhibitions and, later, the wings of auction houses.1 1 - In 2010 Daniel Buren created 365 silk scarves for Hermès, collectively titled Photo-souvenirs au carré, that drew on his well-known black-and-white vertical stripes (his “sign” of painting) that played such a crucial role in his radical institutional critique works of the 1960s and 1970s. Cindy Sherman was selected as one of Louis Vuitton’s “Iconoclasts” and chose to redesign a travelling trunk as part of the Celebrating Monogram project in 2014. Sherman said of her trunk, “I imagine that a Saudi Arabian princess might use it.” No. What we need now, at least for the time being, is for the rest of us — the audience for art, the masses of (non)artists and (non)consumers — to own up to our silence and our clichéd rationales for why art matters.

What do we (the 99 percent) need art to become? What capacities and affects is art still capable of producing? What forces, aside from capital, can motivate and compel our relationship with artworks?

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This article also appears in the issue 85 – Taking a Stance - Taking a Stance
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