lionel ruffel - displaying the contemporary

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THE DROUTHISSUE 52 SUMMER 2015

Displaying The Contemporary/ The Contemporary On DisplayTranslation from French Robin MacKenzie. Revised by the author.

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Displaying the ContemporaryIn 2010, in the introduction of the volume Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?1, I introduced the contemporary as a low profile concept which did not really play a big part in the major theoretical debates of the day. I have to admit that I was wrong about that. Since then, very many diverse realms (disciplinary, geographical, linguistic)

– indeed, more than ever before – have found a degree of common ground in a word which signals, if not the emergence of a shared sense of belonging, then at least a shared concern with time, history and space; with how to inhabit these both as individuals and collectives; a shared concern with representations, material practices and ways of thinking. Many other words (modernity, Renaissance, Enlightenment, etc.) have had the same fate, becoming key-signifiers through which different communities define themselves. The word contemporary emerges, even more than its brilliant precursors, as a category of and for its time (unlike the Renaissance, a concept that was formulated in retrospect) and one that can be found in all discursive realms (media, everyday life, professional life?…) and – for the first time ever – on a global scale.

Such overarching is open to question. It corresponds to the first meaning of the word (belonging to the same time), which is both transitive and relational (belonging to the same time as…). Belonging to the same time means sharing a location, a way of thinking, a history and therefore a sense of shared identity.

Over the course of the last ten years, the meaning of the word contemporary has changed for a second time. For centuries, the contemporary just meant the now. Then, after World War 2, it became a term which designates an era, often used in adjectival form; it is only recently that it 1 Ruffel, Lionel. ed. Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2010.

Lionel Ruffel


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has emerged as a noun, the contemporary, and the more it becomes the contemporary in the singular, the more different meanings it accrues. Having observed the word for several years, what strikes me most is this mixture of unity and diversity: one word, many meanings.

That’s why it’s difficult to have a univocal vision of the contemporary or to understand what contemporary means. Or rather, it has been difficult for me to come up with a single vision of the contemporary until very recently. This single vision is the following:

The contemporary designates co-temporality rather than successivity, and it differs in that from the modern conception of time. And this has an impact on societies and cultures.

If I have only managed to come up with this vision now, it’s because I had to go through a process of renunciation. Renunciation of an assumption which orients all our reflection about our historical identity. We can formulate this assumption quite easily: it consists in thinking that the contemporary is a new and different form of the modern, which means at least two things. On the one hand, that it represents something new in relation to a previous state; on the other, that it is a historical sequence substituting itself for another, since for modernity, historical sequences inevitably follow on from one another. But this mode of thinking, which regards the modern representation of historical temporality (sequential and successive) as historical temporality itself, is precisely what the contemporary brings to a crisis point.

That was, however, my first response to the problem, and that of most theorists of the contemporary. That’s why I first decided to deal with the contemporary as an aesthetic category, which involves studying it in relation to the modern and modernity. In order to do that, I have referred to a text by Hans-Robert Jauss “Modernity and Literary Tradition2” which is well-known to literary scholars. For Jauss, there is a [form of] historical consciousness that is (a) variable or relative to the present, and (b) more or less intense; and moments of great(er) intensity are characterized by the formation or reactivation of a word. The degree of intensity of these moments may be measured by the use or

2 Jauss, Hans Robert. “Modernity and Literary Tradition.” Trans. Christian Thorne. Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 329–64.

reactivation of a word belonging to the semantic field of temporality: for example, “ancient”,

“Renaissance”, “modern”, “modernity”. According to Jauss, these moments are exceptional. They signal the formation of a historical identity, that is to say a moment in which a particular relationship between aesthetic, political and historical experiences becomes crystallized in a word. The noun ‘contemporary’ responds to all of these criteria. According to Jauss, since the end of Roman Empire, a structuring and structural opposition has existed between ancient and new modes of historical consciousness, or rather between ancient and modern. Ancient and modern vary over time, as does the nature of their opposition. Sometimes they are incarnated in a series of words which form a second level in the historical representation of the present: on the one hand, there is “ancient” or “classical”; on the other, variations on the modern such as

“modernity” or “modernism” or “romanticism”. The aesthetic hypothesis presents “contemporary” as a second-level term, comparable to “romanticism” or “modernity” in Jauss’ analysis.

It thus presents the contemporary as a new form of the modern. Now, this hypothesis is in a sense our original sin. It prevents us from understanding the meaning of the word

“contemporary”, particularly as it is expressed in the prefix ‘cum’: with, together, ‘unseparated’. With time, with the times, the times taken together. This is in fact the opposite of modern conceptions of historicity, founded on separation, sequentiality, succession. Indeed for French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, in his ground-breaking book We Have Never Been Modern3, modernity is above all a particular way of conceiving of time. It is time which passes and never returns, a rupture, a revolution in times. Modernity is this break, this separation, this conception of the world based on making distinctions. Up to this point, Latour concurs with Jauss. Jauss’s text in fact constantly foregrounds a vocabulary evoking the irreversible passing of time, the boundary, separation, which is the very sense of the word ‘modern’. “The word modern marks the dividing line between today and yesterday, between what, at a given moment, counts as new and what counts as old.” Here Jauss presents a vision of modernity dating

3 Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge (Mass.). Harvard University Press. 1993 (1991)

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from the nineteenth century in Europe but he reminds us that this meaning of the word is in one sense ‘originary’, insofar as it is the reason for the way the word imposed itself at the start of the Christian era. This is the crux of the matter: the word ‘modern’ implies a representation of time based on the idea of the boundary. And that is something we have inherited. And this, on a deeper level, means that we have inherited of a conception of time conceived as a succession of eras. Time, in this vision, is a series of stations on an irreversible journey in one direction only. This consciousness of opposition, of distinction(s), of separation which imposes itself is so strong during the period which chooses modernity as its emblem, the European nineteenth century, that it incorporates into itself. It is no longer even a question of setting oneself in opposition to the ancients, to the antique, but of defining oneself in opposition to oneself and only oneself, in one’s successive stages. This means defining oneself essentially as opposition.

“Time’s arrow, says Latour, is unambiguous: one can go forward, but then one must break with the past; one can choose to go backward, but then one has to break with the modernising avant-gardes, which have broken radically with their own past.” (Latour, 69) Up to that point, Jauss would probably agree – but perhaps not so much with what follows: “This diktat organised modern thought until the last few years – without, of course, having any effect on the practice of mediation, a practice that has always mixed up epochs, genres, and ideas as heterogeneous as those of the premoderns.” (id.) We can thus distinguish two representations of time: one in the form of an arrow, the other in the form of combinations of different elements. The first of these is modern, the second (according to Latour) is pre-modern; I would add – and this is in a certain sense the argument I’m putting forward – that is also the contemporary. This in no way means that the contemporary is a return to the pre-modern. Instead we should understand the contemporary as the suspension of the representation of time as an arrow. It reconnects with what time is: heterogeneous, a mixture, whether on a subjective or a collective level. In this sense the contemporary really is, in Latour’s word, not modern or a-modern. The contemporary therefore cannot be this ultra-modern sequence,

the most recent stage of modern, its ultimate realisation. It is another mode of being in time, in history, in the world.

It reconnects with other non-modern systems of representation, but without effacing the modern

‘diktat’ which it contains within it. It’s a matter of superimpositions (‘cum’) and not of substitutions.

But what has happened to prevent modern temporality from appearing as one possibility among others? To make all temporalities appear as co-temporal, as contemporary? The modern schema of time has been overwhelmed by “human multitudes and the nonhuman environment”, it is falling apart, it no longer holds together. It appears almost incongruous faced with the non-modern majority.

‘It was the systematic connection of entities in a coherent whole that constituted the flow of modern time” (105) This flow is now ‘turbulent’, it has been opened up to cacophony, to all manner of combinations.

It is this turbulence, these mixtures, this cacophony, which informs my understanding of the contemporary. We now understand its underlying dynamic, which has led me from Jauss to Latour, from a modern mode of representation to a contemporary one.

For three years I have tried to engage on an empirical level with the issues raised by the question ‘What is the contemporary?’, regardless of who might be asking the question or where they might be asking it from. That was in my opinion the only way to avoid falling back into the epistemological assumption I mentioned earlier. It was the only way to acknowledge the globalisation of this common shared preoccupation4. In the second part of this essay, I will follow the question as it has been addressed in the public space of art. Why? Because when we look back on how the word

‘contemporary’ was established as a broadly recognized historical identifier, we can see that the transformation of the public spaces of art played a major role.

4 See Ruffel, Lionel. Brouhaha, Les Mondes du Contemporain. Paris-Lagrasse : Verdier, 2016.


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The Contemporary on Display Horizontality, Rosario 2004Indeed, the first time the question “What is the contemporary?” was asked was in a series of articles published by the journal Zum of the Centro de Expresiones Contemporáneas in Rosario Argentina. It is significant that the question first arises in an art centre.

Generally the ‘shift’ from the modern to the contemporary was not so much a chronological issue than an institutional one. To put it simply, it was a question of transforming museums in art centres, that is transforming the public space of art from a sacred space devoted to contemplation (the museum) into a new multifunctional space devoted to experience (the art centre). The Pompidou Center, in Paris, played an important role in this history, housing as soon as it was founded a research library, an institute for contemporary music, a center for “industrial creation”, a hall for living arts, a theater, several restaurants, shops, and… a museum, the aptly named “National museum of Modern Art”. Above all, it was an issue of urban planning.

For this reason, it seems symbolic that the question was posed for the first time by the Centro de Expresiones Contemporáneas in Rosario. The word art is no longer even used but has instead been replaced by ‘expressions’ (“expresiones”).

The question ‘What is the contemporary?’ was not posed at the opening of the Centre but rather in 2004 – a year that also saw the opening of MACRO5 (the Rosario Museum of Contemporary Art). It was as though the creation of a museum of contemporary art caused problems for the town’s centre for contemporary forms of expression, so that the latter had to examine this notion (of the contemporary) which both institutions had in common. One idea emerges clearly from the journal: an interrogation of a certain idea of authority. In each issue, the journal contains a column entitled ‘What is the contemporary?’, which almost defines the journal’s identity. The modest scope of the column and the multiplicity and fragmentary nature of the responses means that no definitive answers are given to our

5 Lorente, Jesús Pedro. The Museums of Contemporary Art: Notion and Development. Trans. Rosa Anía & Noel Murphy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

The Georges Pompidou Centre, Beaubourg, Paris


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question. But that is not the most important thing; the crucial element is that the new public space of contemporary art is more horizontal, more democratic, more social and more accessible to the masses. The contemporary is presented there as ‘a way of seeing’, a cultural practice denouncing ‘elite culture’, an ‘encounter with mass society and its production’. And it concludes with a statement of the essential point

– that the contemporary is presented as ‘a process of cultural democratisation’.

On this point the journal’s writers are not wrong, for the contemporary moment, and the contemporary as a concept, can be seen as widening access to places of culture. Centres of contemporary art – from the most modest to the most spectacular – are both the expression of this and the reason for it. Thus in Rosario a whole section of the population is invited to answer the question: students especially, but also artists, writers, psychoanalysts, university lecturers, anthropologists, directors of institutions, guitarists, social workers, etc. A whole section of the population but not the whole population, for there is also a kind of homogeneity in that section of the population, which is both militant and creative – militating for a democratised culture and against the ‘culture of the elite’.

Thus, scarcely had it been articulated, in a relatively peripheral location like the CEC in Rosario than reflection about the contemporary developed several of the features that would characterise it in the following years. It emerges from an undisciplined cacophony; it precedes and then accompanies the authorities who attempt to introduce some order into it and whose attempts then arouse suspicion. The Rosario moment is part of, and reflects upon, the new public space of contemporary forms of expression, which is more horizontal, democratic and populist. A different ‘discursive order’ emerges, one which is emblematic for several reasons: first of all because the earliest theoretical reflection(s) on the contemporary originate(s) in a place previously considered to be peripheral (Rosario, in Argentina); second, this reflection is a reaction to the institutionalisation of Art (with a capital

‘A’) by those who intend to substitute forms of expression for art; third, in terms of public spaces, it creates a gap between [the ideas of] museum and contemporary. Centres and museums are not designed to fulfil the same function; the reaction of the authors of the Rosario review shows us that a kind of institutional mugging of the contemporary can happen, that the contemporary can be a subject of dispute between those who consider that they produce it and those whose job is to institutionalise it.


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Two Histories/ Stories of the Contemporary: the Museum as Institution, Boston 1948.There is, however, a history/story, both meanings of the French word “histoire”, of the contemporary in the museums themselves. Let us leave Rosario now and remind ourselves that unlike other institutions – universities, for example – museums have from their earliest days taken charge of works produced contemporaneously. Museums of modern art partly fulfilled that function in the 20th century but they formed part of the older logic of so-called ‘living’ art (produced by the living artists), which had developed from the start of the 19th century onwards. So, scarcely twenty-five years after the foundation of the Louvre Museum, a museum for the works of living artists was established in the Palais du Luxembourg. The emphasis placed on living artists was bound to cause problems, since it is based on the assumption that works by artists who have just died should be taken down. These artists would then pass through a kind of Purgatory since there had to be a gap of at least ten years after their death before their works could be displayed in the Louvre. Moreover, as they lacked the heritage value of museums devoted to older art and were not inclined to establish a modernist canon as museums of modern art would go on to do, these institutions with no permanent collections, which developed everywhere in Europe, in the United States, in Russia and in Latin America, found their “raison d’être” in the expression of national. Their mission, emblematic of the 19th century, was to promote so-called ‘national’ art. Besides, these museums introduced no museographic innovations in the tradition laid down by the Louvre for heritage art.

The first instance of an institution whose name refers explicitly to contemporary art occurred in 1948, with the foundation of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. This event was all the more significant in that it was accompanied by a manifesto and gave rise to a vast conceptual and terminological debate in the US, including – and this might surprise us – in the popular press. The name of the institution is itself interesting: known originally as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1935, when it was simply a branch of MoMA, the museum makes its first move towards autonomy in 1939, by opting for the title Institute of Modern Art and then Institute of Contemporary Art. The shift from ‘museum’ to ‘institute’ is at least as important as that from ‘modern’ to ‘contemporary’. Nevertheless, it was the change from ‘modern’ to ‘contemporary’ which caused most ink to flow, especially because it was accompanied by a manifesto,

‘Modern Art and the American Public6’, signed by the director and the president of the Board of Trustees. This text was widely distributed to other institutions and the press and its effects were much more dramatic than the authors could ever have imagined. The manifesto states that after the First World War, ‘modern art failed to speak clearly’, and it describes ‘a generalised cult of bewilderment” blocking all communication between artist and public.

The manifesto goes far, proclaiming the end of modern art, which has become ‘dated and academic’, and promoting some [new] guiding principles. For its founders, the ICA was [supposed] to be at once a place for exhibitions, a publishing organisation and somewhere that would facilitate the integration of art, commerce and industry. These principles necessitated a change of name. And form the first idea of a cluster.

6 One can find the manifesto in Guilbaut, Serge, ed. Be-Bomb: The Trans-Atlantic War of Images and All that Jazz, Paris/ New York 1946-1956. Barcelona: MACBA. 2007


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The text dropped like a bombshell into the artistic world of the East Coast (at that time the most powerful in the world), which was excessively dominated by the MoMA7. The response from MoMA, supported by the Whitney Museum of American Art, forced the ‘dissidents’ to jointly sign a text of conciliation (or rather capitulation). This statement in joint declaration delayed for the next three decades a new conception of the museum and consecrated once again the modernist conception exemplified by MoMA. In fact, the ICA was only able to have a marginal influence on new places dedicated to contemporary art. It did, however, show the existence of a museographic critique of modern art, that is a critique of its public space(s) which our second history/ story will bring up to date.

7 Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer.1985

The second history/ story concerns the founding of Beaubourg which was conceived, if not in opposition to MoMA, then at least in the hope of creating a new paradigm of the public space(s) of contemporary art. As far as Beaubourg is concerned, the major innovation consisted in creating what would henceforth be called a ‘cluster’, a centre bringing together several distinct elements – in this case a library, the Centre for Industrial Creation (?), IRCAM and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The dominant idea here was that of the pluridisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity of contemporary creation conceived as a whole that also includes contemporary art. This was the first important element, breaking with the so-called

‘Greenbergian’ vision of art expressed at the time in MoMA.

Beaubourg


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Apart from this interdisciplinarity, the nature of the public space imagined and created here also marks a break with the famous ideology of the ‘white cube’8, this museum layout in closed white rooms. One’s initial experience of Beaubourg is an experience of space: the space which links the piazza and the forum, and that which, thanks to the escalators, leads to the extraordinary view over the city. The initial layout of the museum was also innovatory since it emphasised the modularity of exhibition spaces and displayed the museum’s quality as a public space by offering visitors the experience of a less-structured and more personalised walk through a more open exhibition space. There is a third crucial element in the layout of the centre: it was intended to regenerate an area of the city that was in decline, something it managed ‘admirably’, transforming the area into one of the most expensive districts in Paris. From then on, virtually all centres of contemporary art have been conceived according to a logic of urban regeneration. At the same time the New Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in New York as an resolutely contemporary alternative to MoMA, not only because the art on display there was more recent but also because it presented itself as a place bringing together the kind of initiatives found in experimental art centres, because it had no permanent collection (a central question in museum conservation) and finally because this new type of space presented itself in concrete terms as a place for the debate on contemporary issues just as much as for the exhibition of objects. Once again, experience and interdisciplinarity, debate and cacophony, were preferred to aesthetic contemplation.

8 O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

These two models, amongst others, have signalled the coming of a new age in the relationship of audiences and probably mark the triumph of contemporary creative practices, insofar as it has become quite impossible today to count and map all the centres of art and of contemporary artistic creation founded on similar principles9: providing the experience of a multifunctional and interdisciplinary space; incorporating a project engaging with local politics; presenting the public sphere in the strict sense of the term as a place for debate.

9 According to Jeebesh Bagchi, the number of museums in the world has experienced a 90% increase between 1987 and 2007, not including galleries, biennales and temporary exhibition spaces. See «Has the moment of contemporary come and gone ?» Field Notes, Inaugural Issue, The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on the Contemporary, Asian Art Archive, 2012, p. 92. See: http://www.aaa.org.hk/cms/Content/upload/download/fieldnotes/ fieldnotes_issue_01_double.pdf


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Ideologies of the exhibition: Les Fleurs américaines, Belleville 2012.All public spaces, all exhibition spaces, are the product of a system of thought, of a history, or indeed of an ideology. The two histories/stories of the contemporary in the museum tell us clearly enough that it is largely in opposition to the ‘museum of modern art’ that the ‘centre of contemporary art’ establishes itself. But in opposition to what, exactly? We could argue that every museum is a museum of modern art. ‘Artification’ (the transformation of artefacts into art objects) and museification are logically interdependent within the modern episteme. Whenever you mention the idea of a museum, you are already referring to a mode of organising sensory experience, which is specifically modern.

Every museum is a museum of modern art. This is an overstatement, which we will need to qualify. However, the history of the museum is well-known nowadays. We could revisit some episodes in this history, the origin of which dates back to the Belvedere Garden of Pope Julius II at the start of the 16th century. Julius – having had a statue of Laocoon brought to him – began to assemble a collection of objects divorced from their religious functions in order to confer upon them a new, aesthetic function. ‘And suddenly a totally different conception of the world emerges in Christendom’ – as I have recently heard at a conference held under the name of ‘Walter Benjamin’10 by a group of actors all over the world.

What was meant by this was that the fate of religious paintings was no longer to prompt to kneel in front of them when they were intended to be objects of aesthetic contemplation. But if the painting is then moved back to the place for which it was conceived, usually a church, it is once again reintroduced into a system and a way of being that are religious. That is why history recalls, and rightly so, that in the Belvedere Garden, right at the start of the period categorised by historiography as modern, an unprecedented way of occupying space and time occurs, and a singular use for objects is invented. The Belvedere Garden is the first museum of modern art, given that there is no museum

10 http://vimeo.com/55504143.

that is not a museum of modern art, whatever the objects exhibited. It is precisely their presentation as art objects, in a space that has (to all intents and purposes) become a sanctuary, which divorces them from their potential uses to bring them together within the category of art, which makes them modern. The museum

– as institution, as representation, as structure – constitutes art, which can itself only be modern. In the end, the artefacts don’t matter that much. The museum transforms them (statues of gods or icon paintings) into art objects. Thus, according to the speaker who played the role of Walter Benjamin, ‘only the artefacts produced after museums came into existence should be considered as authentic works of art11.’

The history of art, which is to be found in museums, has gradually developed a certain number of characteristics which have for centuries organised shared worlds: sequential and successive chronology; a clear emphasis on national organisation (from the start of the 19th century); notions of the author and the original.

We often compare museums to religious buildings, and we have every reason to do so. On the one hand, we should remember that most of the artefacts, which the first museums converted into art objects, had been removed from churches. On the other hand, museums and churches both possess the (inordinate) power to convert objects into a reality that transcends them. But even so there are not many examples in human history of the invention of a type of public space that is devoted neither to production nor to consumption. A type of space that is clearly defined and delimited, that is closed, where the magic of religious or aesthetic emotion – magic in the sense of ‘magical thinking’ – operates. Museums and religious buildings have also the same fate, at least in certain parts of the world. Already we visit museums as witnesses to the history of museums just as we visit churches without feeling any religious emotion.

11 See also Benjamin. Walter. Recent Writings. New Documents, 2014.


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So what has happened to bring the age of museums of modern art to crisis point? What has triggered this crisis in the era of museums of modern art? What has happened to make our relationship with space, at least in certain parts of the world, as desacralized as our relationship with great religious buildings? The history of art is worked out in exhibition spaces, which are spaces of conversion and find their most concrete form in what the artist and critic Brian O’Doherty calls – and we’ve all taken over the expression from him – the white cube. This conversion chamber – consecrating artefacts as aesthetic objects – has been criticised by artists and theorists, who in the name of ‘institutional critique’ have led a broad action-based critique of art institutions, of their display spaces, of their exhibition ideology, of their construction of value (both symbolic and economic). One of the constants of these actions has been to challenge the closed space of the exhibition, its utopian character whereby the ‘work of art’ must be isolated from the triviality of the world. And of course it derives from this isolation its nature as a work. By opening up these spaces, desecrating the white cube, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, actor and spectator, the aesthetic condition and the economic and political condition, object and space, contemplation and action, these acts led progressively to the collapse of the institution-expression ‘museum of modern art’. But the effects of this collapse go far beyond exhibition spaces; they affect the very occupation of our shared spaces.

Paradoxically, at the same time as these exhibition places where art is exhibited are multiplying exponentially, their specificity as museums of modern art is disappearing. The model of the museum as a place where the profane sphere of everyday experience and the sacred sphere of aesthetic contemplation are separated no longer exists – not even in the museums themselves. We can see the reduction ad absurdum of this in the development of heritage museums. Thus in the Louvre you can now enjoy a video-game experience thanks to a Nintendo DS, thereby inhabiting several spaces at the same time.

Reductio ad absurdum it may be, but it allows me to recap some of the principal arguments of this essay. The museum is an apparatus that established modern art and in spite of its boundless development, that system is in ruins, to borrow the famous metaphor of the US art historian, Douglas Crimp.12 The name ‘contemporary art’ refers not so much to a transformation in the nature of artefacts as a transformation of exhibitions and hence of sensory experience.

The contemporary is perhaps above all a question of public space and the public sphere. In the end, we shouldn’t be very surprised by that, for sharing the same time implies sharing the same space, whether the latter is a concrete, physical space or an abstract sphere of discussion. Within this framework, one particular emblematic public space had to be visited: the museum which, together with places of worship and libraries, is one of the few institutionalised public spaces.

12 Crimp, Douglas. On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993


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That means one of the few public spaces that enables co-presence and contemporaneity – that is the simultaneous presence of people in one place. It has an ideology specific to modernity, distinguishing inside from outside, producers and receivers, sacred and profane. Of all public spaces, it is the one that has developed and diversified most, to the point of losing its specificity while becoming an emblem of what contemporary means. The adjective

‘contemporary’ in ‘centre of contemporary art’ indicates the end of the system-institution of the museum, that is the end of a specifically modern form of experience, in that it is an experience of distinction. The centre of contemporary art is open, not delimited. It is in the street, in the city, it is not a monument, isolated and utopian. The contemporary experience of art is exactly this experience of absence of distinctions. Inhabiting the world no longer consists in passing from one room to another, from the profane to the sacred, but rather superimposing layers of experience.
