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tacit agreement in Kant — of being "alone together with other people" — is
replaced by direct confrontation.
Ultimately, these confrontations do not lead to consensus but introduce differences
that remain radically incommensurable. Instead of realising a universal community,
each person is left with a limited community and a particular sense of belonging
that simply cannot be shared beyond the community’s immediate members. The
universality of aesthetic judgements and pleasure — which partly depends upon the
absence of a concept for beauty — proves to be an illusion that is suddenly broken
by the real specificity of ethnicity, nationality, language and cultural practises. In
Foreigners Free, the foreign museum visitor is set apart from locals while enjoying
special privileges at their expense. Haaning’s joke series provides yet another
example. In particular, Arabic Jokes (1996), paired three jokes written in Arabic
with an image of a topless Danish pin-up girl, which were placed on posters and
distributed throughout Vesterbro, a red light district and ethnically mixed area in
Copenhagen. Danes may be attracted by the naked woman, but the majority of them
cannot understand the jokes, which, again, can be enjoyed only by the Arabic
speaking immigrants who live in the area. The topless woman, offensive to many
Muslims (whether Arabic speaking or not), reaffirms the "openness" and "liberal"
attitudes of Denmark, but these local Danish customs are clearly not extended to
the foreigners who live there and only serve to exploit women for pornography.
While the Arabic jokes are not pointedly racist, the laughter of Arabophones among
each other echoes the laughter of every racist who has made fun of them in the past
for their cultural specificity. Much like the subject of Kantian aesthetics, the individual
who tells racist jokes always claims assent from others by assuming that the joke
will not be offensive to them. 3
While curtailing the universal claims of the Kantian subject — whatever his or her
origins —, Haaning also undermines the public museum’s attempts to facilitate
aesthetic judgements and pleasure. By selling consumer goods in the museum and
gallery at discount prices, Haaning exploits the autonomy of the art work, only to
destroy it. Super Discount and Travel Agency as well as Trade Bartering (1996),
encourage people to satisfy personal needs instead of pursuing "disinterested
pleasure" by tempting them with an array of objects that have a specific use and
purpose. Trade Bartering perhaps best reflects the equivocal status of an object
that oscillates between art work and commodity. Haaning purchased everything
from salami to schnapps in Denmark, imported the goods to Norway and then sold
them as art works at the ticket counter of the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. As vehicles
for creating community, art works are not subject to the import taxes levied on