download catalogue high resolution pdf (22.3 mb) - Jens Haaning
download catalogue high resolution pdf (22.3 mb) - Jens Haaning
download catalogue high resolution pdf (22.3 mb) - Jens Haaning
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"agreeable" ones that reflect the tastes of an elite ruling class. The fee scale, while<br />
benefiting marginalised groups, also serves as a guarantee for full paying visitors<br />
that they will be seeing works that can be judged by everyone and thus can be<br />
rightfully called beautiful. The fee scale, however inclusive, encourages the state of<br />
being "alone together with other people."<br />
Once again, <strong>Haaning</strong> exaggerates the public museum’s universal claims by letting<br />
foreigners in for free. Why not? Why shouldn’t foreigners enjoy the same privilege<br />
as students, school children, the unemployed and the handicapped? Of course, the<br />
public museum assumes that foreigners are tourists who can pay the full fee since<br />
they paid for their trip. And what about the foreigners who live as immigrants in the<br />
country alongside nationals? It seems that their aesthetic judgements and pleasure<br />
do not count; the possibility of their exclusion in no way threatens the universality<br />
of the community realised through aesthetics. Like the interns in an asylum centre,<br />
a mental hospital or a concentration camp, they are part of society but do not<br />
belong. Far from celebrating the public museum, <strong>Haaning</strong>’s fee scale actually<br />
underscores its uncanny brand of xenophobia which amounts to nothing less than<br />
a fear of foreign locals, difference in the same. One would have thought that<br />
"difference in the same" would be an apt description of community. But, then<br />
again, it all depends where someone is standing.<br />
1 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 222.<br />
2 For an elaboration, see Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998). In the book’s<br />
glossary, Bourriaud offers the following definition of relational aesthetics: "Set of artistic practises that take as a<br />
theoretical and practical point of departure the entirety of human relations and their social context rather than an<br />
autonomous and privative space." Ibid., 117.<br />
3 An example also lies in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella "Passing," the story of an African-American woman who<br />
passes for white in the era of segregation. When her white husband tells a racist joke about "black scrimy devils"<br />
to her friends, who are also passing, they laugh with him, albeit for very different reasons. By withholding their<br />
difference, they respect his right to claim universal assent. Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; New York: Penguin<br />
Books, 1997), 39-40.<br />
4 For a description of biopolitics, see the final section in Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).<br />
JAB<br />
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