Further Shifts in the Balance Between Religion, Politics and Art

Notes from Matthew Jesse Jackson's August 2008 Bookforum review of Art Power, by Boris Groys:

Boris Groys was born in East Berlin in 1947 and was educated in the Soviet Union.

"Having witnessed firsthand the fall of a secular superpower, Groys takes for granted that there will be further shifts in the balance between religion, politics and art." He is uniquely positioned to comment on culture created in a "free market" system.

Groys questions whether institutional critics have it right when they assert that art made for spectacle-based markets are more a part of "real life" than art presented within the historically and critically informed space of the museum.

More interestingly, he asserts that it is the terrorist and anti-terrorist alike who practice image-making. These iconophiles attempt to shock or seduce viewers into compliance or participation by adding to "modernity's infinite sequence of images." [We would also note that free-market religious cultural production most often operates in the same way, adding to the stuff of material culture.] These image-producers can be called "radical" (acting out of, or in reaction to, political and religious extremism), but artists have functioned as a very different kind of iconoclastic radical for almost a century. "The artist is no longer a maker of images, but an expert in their unmaking."

"What would happen," Groys wonders, "if all art created within market structures were to be judged as morally suspect in the same way as the art produced in totalitarian societies?"

He compares Jesus Christ to Duchamp's readymades:

Since Christ is outwardly similar to other men, and the readymade resembles other objects, both embody a "difference beyond difference"; that is, they manifest a difference "that we are unable to recognize because it is not related to any pregiven structural code." In art, [Groys] concludes, the "new" is not merely that which is different, but that which is different in a different way.

According to Jackson, Groys's "art criticism is a work of art that unfolds through philosophical language, rather than a collection of philosophical essays on art." He quotes Groys: "Art criticism has long since become an art in its own right; with language as its medium and the broad base of images available, it moves as autocratically as has become the custom in art, cinema, or design."

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