During the French Revolution they didn’t know what to do with all of the oppressive royal monuments and the statues of posh bastards on horseback. An argument ensued in which some revolutionaries wanted to tear down these monuments, while others wanted to preserve them as part of the “national heritage” of the new republic. After they destroyed a few masterpieces they decided to transform the Palais du Louvre into the first public museum, and so the modern art world was born. The abhorrent symbols of oppression were magically transformed into “art objects״. The people who made them were elevated from their lowly status as mere artisans and rose to the heroic title of “artists” whose names would be remembered long after the people who were commemorated by these statues were forgotten.
Soon everybody wanted a museum because it tuned out that in order to have national identity you need lots of heritage (paintings, music, poetry and occasionally even theatre). The people in charge of the museum also ran the newly created academies, where they got to decide what goes in the museum as well as trained the artists who had previously belonged to the guilds. Middle class people (aka “the public”) wanted to send their children on a tour of all of the museums in Europe as part of their education, so publishers began selling books written by professional “art critics” who could tell the good from the mediocre. “Works of art”, as these paintings and statues were now called, were displayed in salons rather than in palaces and were sold in auction houses for sums that kept getting higher because truly, no price is high enough when it comes to “genius”, and so we got the art market as it is today. Philosophers decided they needed to think about this and promptly invented a whole new branch of philosophy called “aesthetics” and asked questions about truth and nature and whether anything is really objectively beautiful or whether it’s all a matter of taste.
There are those who say, and I happen to agree, that one of the best ways to understand the general upheaval we are now experiencing is to think about it in terms of a digital revolution (although there are other useful frameworks like the anthroposcene and the capitaloscene etc.). In digital terms we can say that the French revolutionaries reprogrammed the monuments they decided to preserve. They built their new nation state with the institutional (social-linguistic) software called “Art”. Now the “angry mob” is tearing down statues again, but the art software used by the French revolutionaries is badly out of date and there is no upgrade. It can no longer serve to preserve such artefacts. It turns out that the statues are not enough in and of themselves in order to preserve national identity. It turns out that in order to tell us who we are, art needs to do more than simply exist. It needs to be interesting, challenging, exciting and perhaps even beautiful. More than that, it needs to make you work hard in order to learn how to perceive it, which is why art not only tells you who you are, it makes you who you are. These statues here can’t do any of that. They are ugly in every sense. But that doesn’t even matter because in digital terms, when we look at these statues we don’t see any of their tactile or spatial qualities, we see them only as software designed to program our identities and our histories and we’re not having it. We’re like Neo in the Matrix who sees all shape, colour, taste, smell, sound and touch as lines of code. For better or worse, this is our digital superpower, such as it is. Art as it has existed for the past two hundred years no longer makes sense. Out with the new and in with the old…
