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part of the reality that grants this art legitimacy — the artist makes visual offers to
a society that reacts by demand or by lack of interest. Every work of art pre-exists
as a possibility of staging reality, its realisation is nothing but a formal confirmation.
One may also put it as follows: Art is a claim, which, as a work of art, must
retrospectively assert itself in discourse. However, as this discourse is always led
within one of the aforementioned sub-systems, which differentiate themselves in
the social context, all art belongs to one kind of society or another; it is therefore
dependent on the specific definition of the frame in which art takes place. An
example: Rikrit Tiravanija's kitchenette, which he installed in Berlin in 1992, not
only changed because visitors entered the white cube; due to its social implications,
it also varied from one place to another. Berlin, New York and Paris, or Sao Paulo,
Yokohama and Johannesburg — all of these cities mirror communities that vary in
themselves and to whom Tiravanija's art necessarily had to appear as a project
coded even within one's own culture. In other words: Even if all those cities have a
similar idea of tea-as-drink, the idea of tea-as-art is in the end determined by the
different status of culture. 7 It is, therefore, neither the artist nor his production that
defines the work, but the specific cultural context in which this work is interpreted.
This is the kind of exchange that is happening in times of biennials and migration
movements. Hou Hanru, again, made the following decisive observation concerning
globalisation: "Every city, every region and every nation-state is undergoing decisive
change due to the departure of groups from the local community and the arrival of
others in society. The prerequisites, discourses, ideologies and values in producing
localities have become a completely unknown adventure." 8
This situation has consequences. Merely authorizing what wants to be art does not
work by claiming that art represents the expression of a social counterpart, let
alone of a social whole. A work of art is not in itself the Other; it only enacts
otherness — and it refers to otherness, which is again determined by the respective
counterpart: the US or Asia, religious or multi-cultural state, small town or metropolis,
liberal or conservative — one is always dealing with diverging circumstances. From
the beginning, therefore, art exists in a state of dependence upon one of those
sections, where society must have long before differentiated itself. There is no gap
in the system which was not already intended for art. The sociologist Niklas
Luhmann insistently proved this relation: "The artist himself, therefore, must
observe the emerging work in a way so that he can discern how others will observe
it. In doing so, he cannot know how others — what others? — will take from the
work into their consciousness. But he will include in the work itself something that
guides the expectations of others and will try to surprise them. Only in this way can
the work of art produce astonishment, to put it in the old-fashioned way. Only in this