Art Without an Artist: On the Question of the Criteria of Contemporary Art

Abstract

The article raises the question of the authorship of works of contemporary art, the institutional nature and socio-economic conditions of its production, as well as the spatial and media-aesthetic mediations of its perception. The main research problem is formulated at the intersection of two questions: is everything that artists produce may be considered art? And: are artists the only authors of the works they signed? The problem is the appearance of a commodity form for works of contemporary art, which does not interfere with them, but, on the contrary, becomes a condition for their social and cultural legitimation, recognition in the context of the history of world art, i.e.museumification. In addition, the article discusses: The ontological status of art objects produced by contemporary artists or, more precisely, by the entire industry and contemporary art market; a specific way of their impact on a person, which, as a purely aesthetic, is abstracted from other channels of sensory and existential experience; and: The integral artistic experience of being-with-art or in-art of spectators and artists, its structure and essence. The methodological approach to the phenomenon of contemporary art developed in the article simultaneously criticizes the positions of aesthetic nominalism and realism, relying on the vocabulary and tools of the theory of art by Walter Benjamin and Russian constructivism. As an alternative to the currently dominant criteria for evaluating works of contemporary art (for example, by T. de Duve), the authors propose an original theory of the Russian left avant-garde with the central concepts of the artistic “thing-comrade” and the collective author-producer.