The art work neither articulates its intimacy with nature and origins, nor does it make friends with the Zeitgeist. Art exists only as a conflict with its times and the reality of the Zeitgeist. Every genuine art work is out of time. It always comes too early, always from the future, never from the past. Bad art can be recognized through its sentimentality, nostalgia, adoration of the past, through its inability to make the future precise. Instead of competing with documentation and historical work, art is an opening toward the future. It is always a matter of tailoring names to the future today, of giving — today, here and now — a form to the formlessness of tomorrow. The defining task and mission of art includes the courage to give answers to questions which the future poses, to questions which do not preexist. There is no art beyond such an answer. There is no art beyond the wager of bringing forth something new. However much the new relies on what already exists, it remains, as demanded by the Aristotelian perspective, nevertheless embedded in the material texture. The new redefines this texture, it rewrites it by appearing in it as something unforeseen, as something impossible.
— Marcus Steinweg’s, essay “23 Theses on art, Philosophy, Truth, and Subjectivity,” was recently published in the exhibition catalog for Berlin: 2000, which remains on view at Pace Wildenstein through 18 April. This particular passage, thesis number 22, is particularly pertinent given the recent opening of the New Museum’s Generational, which I find rife with works whose sentimentality is more ironic than it is wistful. It performs nostalgia for a decade that many experienced as children, yet “remember” (reference) as though they were adults. More thoughts soon on AiA.
