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anyway. Due to these links, new specialists such as art biologists, eco-designers,
economy performers, etc., appear. Becoming flexible is in itself an expression of a
globalisation that the french curator Hou Hanru outlined as follows in an essay on
the consequences of September 11: "More and more, people wander around the
planet at a speed as of yet unknown. Their motives are different, ranging from those
of economic refugees to those of the politically exiled, from cheap labour to the
jetset of the political, economic and intellectual élite. Yet what all of these groups
have in common is the logic of global capitalism. They are both the symptom and
the catalyst of this irreversible trend." 2
In this process, the definition of what makes art art has become a complex discourse,
which cannot be reduced to a sum of statements, but which constantly produces
new approaches. Hans Ulrich Obrist therefore presupposes a "laboratory" where
all disciplines complement one another. 3 Art always produces a surplus of
communication — even though the concrete object of communication does not
speak about art — because the system of art negotiates models that communicate
artistic practice. This system transforms concrete objects into semiological
attributes. Art that does not allow one to make a statement is no art. The opposite
is equally true, if we think of Ad Reinhardt's dictum: "Art is art as art, and everything
else is everything else." 4 Yet, even this statement exists only as an additional
definition by Reinhardt; it makes art communicable by translating Reinhardt's
demands on the work of art into language.
This kind of exegesis surrounding the correct definition of art reached its climax in
the 1990s. "But is it Art?" The rhetorical question that Nina Felshin used in the title
of her study The Spirit of Art as Activism (1995) clearly reflects that it is not the
legitimisation, but rather the authorisation to interfere that determines what is being
negotiated as art. Since the 1960s, projects are shifting from the institutional to the
public space so as to create "social commitment". 5 Yet, if one considers the ensuing
art production in the course of developments during the 1990s, this utopia seems
dubious: Scientific discourses surrounding genetic engineering, for instance, are
reproduced merely as illustration in artistic practice; at the same time, art interventions
in socially weak or socially charged milieus (drugs, homelessness, migration etc.)
have trouble freeing themselves as an advanced project from the reproach of being
conventional social work which acts as a quasi-Ersatz for what the state has failed to
do. The Hamburg critic Roberto Ohrt therefore complains that such projects burden
cultural realms "to compensate for gaps in the social realm". 6
The conflict has its root in its relation to reality: the production of art is always already
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