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Harald Szeemann’s documenta 5 is considered one the most important exhibitions in the history of art. But hardly anyone is familiar with its original concept, which, in the spirit of May 1968, turned radically against art as something you could own. Instead of the art object, the collective event took centre stage. Bazon Brock, who worked with Szeemann on the project, talks about the exhibition that could have been.
It has become an all too common cliché that everyone from brokers to Uber drivers is employed under the model of the artist. Over and over, you hear that the boundaries between art, pop, and creative industries are blurring. What sets the artist apart from the non-artist? What sets the art object apart from other objects? A discussion with artists Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Simon Denny, and exhibition maker and gallerist Alexander Koch, moderated by Kolja Reichert.
Why does the art of today often seem to exist in a historical vacuum? What is the significance of art history for post-Internet art? Is our sense of history changing because of the accelerated circulation of images, money and data? Where does this leave the art object? At Spike’s new space in Berlin, Kolja Reichert moderated a discussion between artist and essayist Hito Steyerl, art historian Susanne von Falkenhausen, and two of the four curators of the 2016 Berlin Biennial: Lauren Boyle and Marco Roso from the collective DIS.
Many people are anxious that the growing class divide in the art world and the succession of record-breaking prices paid for contemporary art endanger the belief system supporting it. But why is nobody worried about money itself? Isn’t what happens at an auction that money celebrates its freedom, its release from the burden of being a means of comparison? Is art the new money? On a currency that lives from the bank of the gaze, into which we all make payments.
Martin Kippenberger’s idea of an art that reflects its social conditions has evolved into an art world that integrates everything. What happens when the work dissolves into its context and the form of the work becomes a form of life?
