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"agreeable" ones that reflect the tastes of an elite ruling class. The fee scale, while
benefiting marginalised groups, also serves as a guarantee for full paying visitors
that they will be seeing works that can be judged by everyone and thus can be
rightfully called beautiful. The fee scale, however inclusive, encourages the state of
being "alone together with other people."
Once again, Haaning exaggerates the public museum’s universal claims by letting
foreigners in for free. Why not? Why shouldn’t foreigners enjoy the same privilege
as students, school children, the unemployed and the handicapped? Of course, the
public museum assumes that foreigners are tourists who can pay the full fee since
they paid for their trip. And what about the foreigners who live as immigrants in the
country alongside nationals? It seems that their aesthetic judgements and pleasure
do not count; the possibility of their exclusion in no way threatens the universality
of the community realised through aesthetics. Like the interns in an asylum centre,
a mental hospital or a concentration camp, they are part of society but do not
belong. Far from celebrating the public museum, Haaning’s fee scale actually
underscores its uncanny brand of xenophobia which amounts to nothing less than
a fear of foreign locals, difference in the same. One would have thought that
"difference in the same" would be an apt description of community. But, then
again, it all depends where someone is standing.
1 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 222.
2 For an elaboration, see Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998). In the book’s
glossary, Bourriaud offers the following definition of relational aesthetics: "Set of artistic practises that take as a
theoretical and practical point of departure the entirety of human relations and their social context rather than an
autonomous and privative space." Ibid., 117.
3 An example also lies in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella "Passing," the story of an African-American woman who
passes for white in the era of segregation. When her white husband tells a racist joke about "black scrimy devils"
to her friends, who are also passing, they laugh with him, albeit for very different reasons. By withholding their
difference, they respect his right to claim universal assent. Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; New York: Penguin
Books, 1997), 39-40.
4 For a description of biopolitics, see the final section in Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
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