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The Production of Social Space as Artwork 249

9. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of

Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” in October: The Second Decade, ed.

Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, and Silvia

Kowbolski (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 119.

10. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markham (New

York: Grove Press, 1967), 17.

11. One unfortunate example of the museological integration of institutional critique

as a museum object and paraphernalia is the 1999 exhibition “Museum as Muse:

Artists Decide” organized at the Museum of Modern Art by Kynaston McShine.

Nowhere was the idea of institutional critique more disarmed and artists more complicit

in the game than this exhibition. More disappointing in this case was Michael

Asher’s take in the exhibition on the deaccessioned artworks from the museum’s

collection.

12. Hal Foster is one of the few critics to have offered a most scathing reXection

of this critical turn in his magisterial text “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in Return

of the Real (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 171–203.

13. Ibid.

14. See Sydney KasWr, “African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow,”

in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. Okwui

Enwezor and Olu Oguibe (London: INIVA [Institute for International Visual Arts];

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 88–113.

15. See, for example, Wole Soyinka’s critique of negritude in Myth, Literature,

and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

16. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses

(London: Routledge, 1993).

17. Yinka Shonibare and Chris OWli are but two of the most well-known African

artists who have made the critique of authenticity central to their work. In the case

of Shonibare, he has used the idea of excess as a strategy to undercut the power of

the authentic as a marker of cheapness and lack of sophistication.

18. See Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, “Figures of the Subject in Times of

Crisis,” Public Culture 7, no. 2 (1995): 323–52.

19. See Cornelia Klinger, “The Politics of the Subject—the Subject of Politics,”

in Democracy Unrealized, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer,

Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, and Octavio Zaya (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz

Verlag, 2002), 285–301.

20. Achille Mbembe, On the PostColony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University

of California Press, 2001), 10.

21. Sydney KasWr has made the important observation that questions of authenticity

of African art were Wrst a value of connoisseurship of the Western collector

for whom the importance of authenticity depended on the establishment of what is

valued as real and what is not valued as a copy or a fake. Therefore, the science of

authentication is no more than a fantasy of projection through the construction of

“tribal style” whereby “authenticity as an ideology of collection and display creates

an aura of cultural truth around certain types of African art (mainly precolonial and

sculptural).” KasWr, “African Art and Authenticity.”

22. Mbembe, On the PostColony, 6; emphasis in original.

23. Throughout, I have pivoted my idea of crisis around Achille Mbembe and Janet

Roitman’s exceedingly important text “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis.”

24. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at Collège de France,

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