Boris Buden

Art after the End of Society1

Translated by Marina Miladinov.

Sociability is gradually replacing sociality.2

The title is a paraphrase of Danto's claim that contemporary art takes place
after the end of art.3 To be sure, Danto does not consider the end of art to be
a sort of death, after which it would continue living an otherworldly life. In fact,
the end of art means the end of a particular art history, of a perfectly defined
narrative. Even though the story of art is finished, its subject art production
is not. Artists still produce artworks, only they cannot claim that those artworks
represent a particular moment in art history. What is missing is the awareness
that the art they are creating belongs to some great narrative, or even that it is
different from the art that was created at any previous stage of artistic
evolution, for example, modern art. According to Danto, contemporary art can
be aware of the existence of art history, but it does not feel the need to
advance or evolve that history, or even to distance or liberate itself from the
past. Thus, it is all about the spirit in which art is created. That spirit, the spirit
of art history as a narrative that encompasses particular artworks, has simply
vanished.
The spirit we are talking about here should, in fact, be understood in terms of
the philosophy of spirit, that is, in the Hegelian sense or that of German
romanticism as a whole. Just like the spirit in Hegels philosophy undergoes

1
2

Article was first published in Maska, No. 121-122, Spring 2009.

Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in the text are taken from Maja Breznik's report The Field of Cultural Production in the Sphere of Visual Arts. (Ed. Note)
3
Cf. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

the process of its dialectic evolution, or to put it more precisely, various stages
on its path of development, in order to achieve its final form which is absolute
knowledge, the notion of art history also used to include an image of an
evolutionary process, of undergoing various stages in that process. German
language and German romanticism have termed that Bildungsprozess (a
process involving learning and education of both the individual and the
collective or in the tradition of German romanticism: of the subjective and
objective spirit). The hypothesis of the end of art actually implies the end of an
image of such development. That end, both here and in the case of the
absolute spirit, involves a sort of awareness or knowledge of the path that has
been left behind, which is the awareness of the completed education process.
Briefly contemporary art is aware of the art history it has completed, but it is
equally aware of its role in educating (representing and/or transforming) the
world.
The problem with this hypothesis resides in the fact that its social significance
has been made utterly abstract: the end of art occurs as its self-referential act.
Art articulates its end in relation to its own history. That way, it asserts itself at
least in one of the basic characteristics of art history, whose end it has
proclaimed namely, the idea of autonomy. The self-invented end of art
remains within the traditional framework of the idea of arts autonomy.
To be sure, it is supposed that we are capable of reconstructing the historical
context in which that end of art is taking place, such as the postmodern end of
the great narratives, late capitalism, the dissolution of the idea of social
revolution, and revolution in general, the end of utopia, etc. In that context, the
hypothesis about the end of art seems not only plausible, but almost banal. In
fact, it seems as if art were simply following some general trends,
transforming itself in accordance with them.
The only way to avoid that banality and yet step over the horizon of the idea of
arts autonomy is to directly raise the question of the social context of
contemporary art, or rather, of the hypothesis about its end.
That is where we immediately stumble across a fundamental difficulty. The
so-called social context of contemporary art including the context in which
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the interviews have taken place, which clearly comes into the foreground is
the context of global neoliberal transformation. In terms of ideology and
politics, it describes the epochal framework of contemporary art, or rather its
self-transformation into art after the end of art.
Let us recall: neoliberal transformation appears in the form of conservative
right and anti-socialist policy, which often achieves its goals through sheer
violence. Pinochets coup dtat in Chile and the terror of military juntas in
Argentina and some other countries in the southern region of South America
during the 1970s are the best examples of the practical implementation of
neoliberal ideas. In its totally pragmatic sense, the main goal of terror is to
destroy certain social structures that the neoliberal policy considers to be
obstacles to the development of private business and free market. It was only
later that it became clear what that devastating attack on all elements of the
welfare state was actually about. It was an attack on the society as such, on
the very idea of the society, rather than the mere dismantlement of individual
institutions of the welfare state. Nobody has expressed the basic fantasy of
neoliberal ideology as clearly and unambiguously as Margaret Thatcher,
perhaps the most significant name in the epoch of neoliberal political
upheaval. In an interview from 1987, Thatcher simply stated that there was no
society in the first place. There were only individual men and women, there
were families, but no society as such: There is no such thing as society.4
That famous sentence, which still hovers as a motto over the entire epoch of
neoliberal hegemony, was not uttered by a sociologist or a philosopher, but by
a politician, whose words had performative power. In other words, it was not a
scholarly insight, but a perfectly defined political programme: a call for
destruction of all forms of social solidarity in order to open up space for
individualism, private property over all imaginable and unimaginable things,

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given
to understand I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it! or I have a
problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it! I am homeless, the Government must
house me! and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no
such thing! There are individual men and women and [fo 1] there are families and no
government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Margaret Thatcher: Interview for Woman's Own magazine ("No such Thing as Society"), 31
October 1987.
(http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689).

such as personal responsibility, family values, etc. The fact that the society no
longer existed meant that the private sphere could now expand endlessly at
the cost of the private.
Whereas in the late 70s, when Thatcher came to power (as well as the most
prominent neoliberal politicians Ronald Reagan and Teng Hsiao Pingh), the
claim that there was no society was merely a political programme to follow,
today, thirty years later, it has become a reality. We live in a world in which
the society no longer exists.
That is where the paradoxical question about the social context of
contemporary art arises. Its social context is not the context of the society and
that is the fundamental premise, on the basis of which we must understand
contemporary art and the accompanying phenomena. In that sense we may
correct or rather, socially contextualize Dantos hypothesis: it is not about
art after the end of art, but rather about art after the end of society.
Let us try, therefore, to take that as a premise and reflect upon some excerpts
from interviews with individuals that are active in the field of contemporary art
in Slovenia.
We shall start from the notion of the art-system, introduced by our
interviewees themselves in order to name adequately with respect to the
time and situation their field of activity as the field of contemporary visual
arts.
They all talked about the structure or the logic of the art system,
sometimes even using the phrase in English and thus suggesting that it
is obvious which system they had in mind and where this system came
from. They argued that artists either enter the system or, if they do not
penetrate into it, they fail. Artworks either circulate in the art system
or they resist it [...]. Apparently, the key criterion of the art system is the
price of artworks; the measures of an artists success are the price of
her work and her breakthrough into the most elite art circles. Only after
the artist has entered these elite circles, she becomes one of the
players. The participants also referred to the art system as the

machine or the structure to depict the irrational origin of this

phenomenon, the seething of its signified, with a floating signifier
machine, to render it rational, calculated, something possessing an
inner structure and logic.
Let us formulate a simple question: is the art-system a sort of social subsystem and is it conceivable as a (relatively autonomous) social sphere?
Briefly, is the art-system located within the society and if yes, where exactly?
It is obvious that we cannot answer that question positively. Even though our
interviewees emphasized that the art-system was rather developed in certain
settings (environments), while in others it was not (allegedly in Slovenia it was
not), we cannot identify the notion of setting with the (national) social setting.
Apparently, the art-system is a trans-national phenomenon, although not in a
universal sense. After all, it is western, which means that it is a feature of
only one western cultural apparatus. It consists of institutions such as the
museum of modern art, museum of contemporary art, exhibition venues
(kunsthalle), independent galleries and, most of all, powerful autonomous
galleries. Nevertheless, private galleries are its backbone (the gallery system
is, in fact, the core of the art-system). It is also clear that the art-system is
hierarchically constituted:
The local art centres have allegedly disappeared, that is, they have
merged with international centres in Basel, Miami and London, but
even these international centres of power are apparently only a part of
one and the same caravan, which keeps moving from one place to
another.
The Art-system is obviously mobile, even though that mobility is tied to a few
centres around which the whole thing is revolving. Thus, we may speak of a
sort of directed, limited, and controlled mobility. It revolves around several
centres, or rather around one western centre, which includes the most
powerful institutions of the art-system. Art-system equals power-system.
Moreover, the art-system is not an autonomous cultural sphere in itself, since
it is fundamentally determined by market categories the most powerful

centres of the system are those which are also the most powerful ones in
terms of economy. In such a centre, it is impossible to differentiate between
the symbolic and real capital: the main measurement is the price of artworks,
which is set in the centres and corresponds to the evaluation of artistic
production.
To resume: the art-system is a trans-national, hierarchical, market-related
power phenomenon, mobile in a controlled way. But it is not a social
phenomenon. It cannot be located in the social sense, not even as a fantasy
of some trans-national society, for example a trans-national civil society. Its
core is the market articulation of private interest, around which the entire artsystem is structured, including its specific form of (cultural or artistic) public.
That, however, does not mean that art-system contains no elements of
sociality. On the contrary, it seems that it generally functions as a sort of
ersatz-society, which is particularly evident in one of its functions, which our
interviewees have specifically emphasized: They argued that artists either
'enter the system' or, if they do not penetrate into it, they 'fail'." The system is
articulated like a field, through the process of inclusion/exclusion.
Let us recall the role of that function in the formation of modern society.
According to Robert Castel,5 a society is constituted on the level of its
representable totality which is a nation or nation-state in political terms
through the process of double inclusion: that of individual labour force into the
nations productivity and that of individuals into the legal system of the nationstate. In the latter case, it means granting civil and social rights, or rather,
granting the civil rights as social. It is only through that double inclusion that
the society adopts its modern form as a nation organized into a nation-state,
consisting of individuals who are the carriers of the above-mentioned rights.
Could we say that something similar is happening with the art-system?
Apparently, it also entails double inclusion, which constitutes the art-system
as a system. First, there is economic inclusion: individual artists step into the

Die Metamorphosen der sozialen Frage. Eine Chronik der Lohnarbeit (Konstanz: UVK,
2000).

system on the basis of their recognition by the market (The key criterion of
the art system is the price of artworks; the measures of an artists success are
the price of her work and her breakthrough into the most elite art circles.) In
other words, the recognition of an artists work by the market is the
precondition of his or her inclusion into the system as an artist/worker. His or
her artwork participates in the productivity of the very art-system as a system
of art production. That inclusion implies symbolic recognition. Only an artist
within the art-system is a truly recognized artist, who participates in the
reproduction of the symbolic capital of contemporary art, that is, he or she
can use its advantages and benefits and, briefly, gains the right of
participating in the enjoyment of its profit.
Certainly, the art-system is no society, nation, or nation-state, just as being an
artist cannot be considered the same as being German, French, or Slovenian.
And yet, what must be observed both in the art-system and in the
phenomenon of contemporary art that is reproduced in that very system, as
well as in the identity of the contemporary artist, is the dismantlement of the
society, nation, and nation-state, along with the modern art that used to
articulate itself in those social and political entities, in which the artist was still
at home, meaning that he or she was still an artist/citizen and therefore also
a German, French, or Slovenian artist. His or her artwork used to be a part of
the (symbolic) productivity of a society/nation, within which he or she enjoyed
the so-called social recognition. Beyond that society/nation, there was a
sphere of international artistic recognition, the idea of universal artistic values
that constituted the world of art, that is, the great narrative of art history. The
best example is the Venice Biennial. It follows the logic of national
representation, but as an international institution it was superimposed to that
logic. It was supposed that it could extract universal artistic values from that
logic, which would abolish (aufheben) the logic itself and result in something
that was qualitatively superior. It is precisely in that abolishing (aufheben) that
the international recognition was reasserting the logic of social-national
recognition as its (qualitatively) superior form.
Today, the Venice Biennial is no longer capable of reproducing the same
dialectics of production of universal artistic values. It is only one among many
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institutions belonging to the art-system to which it is superimposed. Its elitist

status has no longer anything to do with articulating universal artistic quality.
Its elitist character is reasserted through its role of a door-keeper in the artsystem, and precisely as such it is not situated anywhere in its centre or its
qualitative top, but rather on its fringes, which it controls and where it fulfils the
function of selection, rearticulating the art-system again and again as a closed
system. (We tend to forget that even with the German romanticists the role of
cultural elite, particularly in terms of producing language as the spirit of the
nation, was to create and preserve the borders of the society/nation).
It is a radical, upside-down change in perspective. The art-system is not an
international qualitative superstructure of social/national art scenes, a sort of
their universalist sublimation, but quite the contrary it is only in the light of
the art-system that the domain of social/national art scenes reveals itself as a
sort of its emanation, evolving its logic only when serving that art-system. It is
a sort of de-sublimation6 of the entire traditional field of (social/)national
culture or art. National culture and art do not disappear; instead, they are
radically de-essentialized and instrumentalized which is, after all, also the
case with the nation-states in the context of global articulation of political and
economic power. More precisely, they fulfil their role only by serving the artsystem. That explains the apparent paradox, namely that national culture and
art do not exist, that is, they have been reduced to a mere pejorative term
denoting parochialism, while at the same time they are achieving in the form
of visual arts national breakthrough in the international arena. That
breakthrough is a breakthrough into the art-system, which has been achieved
through the social/national form, but only insofar as that national form has
played the role of the player, in other words, has fulfilled the role of the
institution of inclusion into the art-system. As such, the institution of national
art makes sense only as one among the institutions of the art-system. In itself,
it has no meaning whatsoever and produces nothing, no symbolic capital
whatsoever.

From anti-globalist standpoint, that de-sublimation is experienced as repressive.

It is by all means necessary to comprehend the abstract character of the artsystem in the context of (repressive) de-sublimation and instrumentalization of
the traditional institutions of social/national culture and art, and to comprehend
the main phenomenon from that perspective namely, the disappearance of
society or, more precisely, the disappearance of the social character of artistic
production, the de-socialization of contemporary art:
In the global art system, art seems to have lost contact with a concrete
social and political body, its relationship to the world has become a play
of abstract categories and, most importantly, the artist sees his own
relationship to the world and to himself only through the art exchange
market.
Once again: the art-system is not situated within the society; rather, it
represents a form of its dissolution, which as such precisely reproduces some
of the elements of social formation. After all, artists can see that quite clearly.
They know that, in the art-system, sociability is gradually replacing sociality.
These are the premises under which we should also understand the role of
the museum of contemporary art as an anti-museum. It is already an
institution of the art-system, rather than of national culture, not only in the
trans-national, but also, and above all, in the trans-social sense. Unlike the
traditional museum, which canonizes artistic production on the basis of social
recognition, aesthetically confirming the previously established social value,
thus articulating the interdependence between social and aesthetic values
for the museum of contemporary art, aesthetic value is the most sublime form
of social value, or rather, it treats the social value itself as a sublime or even
spiritual category the anti-museum needs no social legitimization in
articulating aesthetic value. In other words, it is capable of producing aesthetic
value beyond the society, be it in a pre-social or trans-social sense. Its
reference is not the society, it is the art-system.
That fact says a lot about the functioning of contemporary art. However, it
says even more about the non-functioning of contemporary society. Art
without society implies society without art. We can speculate even further: it is
not only that the visual arts of visual culture have ceased to be an important
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factor in the process of education (Bildungsprozess) of a society/nation;

perhaps the very process of educating the society/nation has come to a
definite halt. The society no longer educates anyone; in fact, it no longer
educates itself. The only social experience that can still be articulated today is
the experience of social dissolution. In that sense, contemporary society is still
social as an (aesthetic) effect of the societys dissolution.
Boris Buden studied philosophy in Zagreb and cultural theory at HU Berlin. In
the 90s he was editor of the magazine Arkzin (Zagreb). His essays and
articles cover topics of philosophy, politics, cultural, and art criticism. Among
his translations into Croatian are two books of Sigmund Freud. Buden is the
author of Barikade (Zagreb 1996/1997), Kaptolski Kolodvor (Beograd 2001),
Der Schacht von Babel (Berlin 2004), Zone des bergangs (Frankfurt/Main,
2009).

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