Boris Groys’s Art Power brings together fourteen essays published between 1997 and 2007, and one previously unpublished essay, no date. It ranges over intellectual positions promulgated since the Enlightenment, so the text will be familiar to readers of long-standing disputes about concepts of the modern, the new, the different, the autonomous, the identical, the heterogeneous, et al. All of the essays are written in a philosophical tone, some with astute juxtapositions of art and politics. There are good chapters on Hitler and art and Stalinist dictates in the Soviet Union. Given space limitations, I can only focus on some of the text’s premises. What kinds of power can be said to issue from art, as opposed to the power of politics, institutions, and audiences (and reputations, incomes, etc.)? Which concepts of selection are active, and how, in contemporary art objects and processes?

The essays are intricately connected to Superculture (proliferation), the transformations of judgment and taste, subject and domination, the power of markets and politics, their mixtures, disjunctions, and more. The text assumes an indistinction between notions of “life” and concept, the organic and the artifactual, what is seen and not seen in museums viz. individual “perception” and everyday life. Paradox is the Ur-figure of Groys’s interpretation, the condition of existence of art made in the system of bio-politics (55). Groys is well aware of Superprocesses, e.g., the integration-neutralization of various avant-garde movements, and the shift from art as criticism of society to criticism’s low status (except in universities), with curators now holding control. With no irony, he offers that artworks are “sick and helpless where the spectator has to be led to the artwork,” which flows directly into the affirmation of a cultural-political metaphysic—that “curating is curing” (46). It is paradoxical that Groys does not try to connect such statements with today’s emphasis on art-as-knowledge. “Curing” deserves more analysis.

Shifting between Hegelian and Derridean notions of art and their vicissitudes (89), unafraid of Kojève (a plus), and working hard to sustain “aura” in the understanding of art, Art Power acknowledges that art “wages war itself” (123). It calls forth the “famous dictum that ‘negation is creation,’ which was inspired by the Hegelian dialectic and propagated by authors such as Bakunin and Nietzsche under the title of ‘active nihilism’” (123). A vast literature has argued that Nietzsche engineered his concepts a million miles (direction unknown) beyond negation. The negation argument, in any case, does not fit Groys’s own text. From the get-go, Art Power insists that modern art is an effect of the “logic of contradiction” (2; emphasis in original) with strong entanglements to an even more basic “balance of power,” where art, politics, institutions, and rules of subjectification are competing powers. For Groys the power of art has been structured by “an image of the utopian balance of power that exceeds the imperfect balancing power of the State” (2)—so that art makes images without recourse to alibis of political power, its transcendence. Art pursues its own power, which Groys calls its movement to the infinite, in contradiction to Statist power which requires art for legitimation in every given now.

Groys is well aware that today’s most sophisticated university-generated art installation critical of commodification is also a “reaffirmation” of the market (6), and so paradox holds: “The (self) critical artwork is a paradox-object that fits perfectly in the dominating paradigm of modern and contemporary art” (6). The success of such work is at the expense of art that is directly political—“Art becomes politically effective only when it is made beyond or outside the art market—in the context of explicit political propaganda,” e.g., art in the former socialist countries, Islamic videos, and posters in the antiglobalist front, “where “its production, evaluation and distribution do not follow the logic of the market” (7). Throughout, Groys affirms that because there is no “immanent, purely aesthetic value judgment” on art its lack of foundation guarantees its autonomy. He does not examine “lack” or pursue its politics. He has it that important artworks today affirm “the formal equality of all images under the conditions of their factual inequality”; art’s equality is the manifestation of resistance to “external forces and powers” (13). What is art’s resistance in contradiction to? To any power or force that would subvert art’s utopian vision—to expand its own power (13).

Groys returns again and again to the figure of paradox: what our universities call avant-garde work was made against public taste and draws the most refined analyses not because of its historical importance (its “moment” in a process) but because of its current sign-exchange value (as Baudrillard put it). Instead of thrashing political-propaganda art, Groys insists on its value, if nearly impossible condition. It is paradoxical that universities and museums select art for “public” consideration, but Art Power is silent as to why academic standards of evaluation have taken the place of other “inputs.” Groys even recodes or reinvents the idea of an “inner curator,” which is part of the text’s attempt to keep art, power, representation, history, et al., always “in play,” in movement, hence an affirmation giving them a future untainted by any actual politics of art and scholarship. It is happily paradoxical for Art Power that artistic documentation can make the artificial alive (57), which vastly enlarges the territory called art. He has it, without paradox, that “today’s art [desires] to become life itself, not merely to depict life or to offer it art products” (55). Thus, Art Power is an attempt to keep a distance between art and politics, while the actual premises of the text in fact ground art in total politics—those of institutions. This is a very paradoxical book.

Critical self-reflexive contemporary art work hinges or pivots on paradox. The artist who calls into question State authority with an elaborate installation mixing video, text, documents, grilling boundary issues between work and audience, object and history and the like furthers education (politics), not necessarily art (7). But Groys insists that modern art saved itself from redundancy and worse in becoming a “paradox-object,” e.g., Conceptual art used “iconoclastic gestures directed against it and [turned] these gestures into new modes of art production” (9). Paradox is then a conceptual sanctuary for art; sanctuary denotes a relation of dependence. Instead of pursuing this, Art Power insists that while selection (e.g., by curators) involves mistakes in evaluation (6), the discourse retreats to selection held necessary for more selection, “to draw our attention to interesting or relevant art that is overlooked by . . . institutions” (7). It is a little unnerving that Groys’s discourse is so slippery on such combustible subjects. It is a political question: what (Deleuze) not who “selects selection”?

In any case, the autonomy of art, in full paradox, passes to the site of the exhibition and the museum—art’s resistance to ideology is imaged forth by Groys as the “international exhibition” claimed to be “the image of the perfect balance of power,” further specified as a critique of hierarchies of value (15). The museum exhibition is given a quasi-transcendental status because it allows audiences and curators to compare past and present, which ensures art’s future or power to “rediscover artistic visions and projects pointing toward the introduction of aesthetic quality” (15). But are curators really the heirs of the artist’s once-upon-a-time “magical abnormalities”? (51) That is, making unseen profane things visible is glued to the affirmation that exhibitions in and of themselves are a kind of medicine (46). The media takes the place of the “bad” State, while the museum assumes the place of (explicitly) subjective memory that is given some durative value, i.e., the museum/exhibition conjunction as the saving grace (sanctuary) against art markets (19). Groys does not consider the self-same museum as a place for the politics of memory, the politics of selection, and the politics of the neo-monumentalization of contemporary art. Or that the education of curators is a saturation in total politics.

Art Power links the refurbished museum and curator role(s) with documentation, here defined as the “only possible form of reference to an artistic activity that cannot be represented in any other way” (53). And “art becomes a life form” through documentation, this because the social order requires that art aspires “to become life itself, not merely to depict life or to offer it art products” (55). These quasi-transcendental statements follow from a soft version of the bio-political relations that shape life—something like the performance principle of the new socius—so that bureaucratic and technological documentation via planning reports, statistics, and the like suspends the distinction between life and non-life, the natural, the artificial, the organic. Art documentation (documentation as art) makes living things out of artifactual makings, “whether real or fictive, [and] is . . . primarily narrative, and thus it evokes the unrepeatability of living time” (57). Concepts unavailable to “real” experience can be experienced “really” as art, the “unrepeatability of living time” living again as art. Art is not simulation but “reality” itself—the contemporary consumer prefers the copy (63). When a museum exhibition shows a copy, it becomes an “original event”: “The exhibition makes copying reversible” and helps a viewer understand zones of invisibility (91). Is this paradox in action, Groys probing his readers?

Be that as it may, his apology for museums continues: art is most alive due to “the inner logic of museum collecting itself” (24), for it is the museum that assigns life to art because the museum, as an ever-paradoxical performance, “compels the artist to go into reality—into life—and make art that is seen as being alive” (24). Indeed, without asking whether the museum’s logic of action is itself political, financial, career-making, legitimizing the teachable, and more, Groys defaults by fiat to the transcendence of the museum; compared to its presence/presencing: “the ‘real’ can be defined only in comparison with the museum collection” (24). More: “reality can be defined in this context as the sum of all things not yet being collected.” And again: “Our image of reality is dependent on our knowledge of the museum” (25). Groys does not flinch from this metaphysics that is completely narrativized: “Only the new can be recognized by the museum-trained gaze as real, present, alive” (25). Since the vast majority of any population is in fact illiterate as to how museums and curators “see,” we do not have only sanctuary as difference but also a rationalization of knowing/not-knowing, a justification for institutional selections in the very name of the not-knowing = not-seeing (e.g., the “public”). Groys does not notice that to say and insist in this declarative non-paradoxical manner turns the museum into the State and curators into small and large despots who award (a ward) recognition, Church and State joined. Textually, Groys gives religious phrases for such relations: “you must first be sinful to become a saint—otherwise you remain a plain, decent person with no chance of a career in the archives of God’s memory” (25). He is trying to say that museum’s grant recognition to art that is somehow iconoclastic. “The curator is an agent of art’s profanation, its secularization, its abuse,” but there is no investigation of why it is a good thing that curators fashion exhibitions out of their “own contradictory stories” (51).

Art Power is insistent on legitimizing museums—without giving a single case-history of any museum’s assemblages and how they operate with/as the “logic of contradiction.” Metaphysical obiter dicta sometimes take over, e.g., “Life looks truly alive only if we see it from the perspective of the museum” (30). Installation art recovers the sense of aura, and art-documentation has its own “originality,” a “historical event” (64). Of all actual museum practices, Groys stresses their collection of things and objects that are “characteristic of historical epochs,” the flatness of “characteristic” telling, thereby suggesting a Burckhardtian “taste” for representation. Strangely, he refuses to take up the large critical discourse on such historiography, blocking it by saying, “this notion of historical representation has never been called into question—not even by quite recent postmodern writing” (27). Has he read Lyotard? Paradox: museums are “hot” places—they forbid more “( c)oldness”; they show what art must not look like—the old different. Yet the argument is disingenuous because Groys refuses to specify any selection processes by which museums settle on what to show. I find it difficult to believe that a university-based museum show is not heavily fortified by the discourses of “must see” or where the “editing” (selection) processes are precisely out of sight, out of bounds for any particular show. Thus for Groys to emphasize in a non-paradoxical way that artists are brought to aesthetic networks of all kinds (via school) because every real artist has an “inner curator” (my italics), whose self-reflection tells such artists “what is no longer being collected” (28), is precisely to transfer consciousness of the market into art-historical consciousness—which Art Power canonizes as, “To be present, art has also to look present” (28; emphasis in original). How is this selected? The “inner curator” could just amount to self-censorship and accommodation to the requirements of selectors.

Do museums really stage “difference beyond difference” as their special force of showing what is new, different, and important? Groys invokes Kierkegaard to say that museum shows allow an audience to imagine the “outside” world as “splendid, infinite, ecstatic” (30), but figures this as “symbolic windows opening onto a view of the infinite outside,” which seems rather archaic. I wish that he had examined the fractures between art that has to “look present”—what forces the now—and how conventional symbols apply to “differences beyond difference.” I also wish he had more to say about his own projections, specifically, that museum exhibitions produce “new differences” that do not “exist in reality, because in reality we find only old differences—differences that we can recognize” (31). Why do “new differences” require museums for visibility? If there is a universal “inner curator,” isn’t every subject who takes the trouble to exhibit a selection (primordial self-expression) a “museum”? Again, to say that in (conventional) museum collections differences are non-real and that there is a resultant transcendental subliminality of the museum is just, well, perplexing. That museums “secure” differences (33) should open to how museums select, up and down and across their thresholds of interest and capacities; but Groys only asserts that in museums “ordinary objects” are “promised the distinction they do not enjoy in reality” (33). He might have asked why such a distinction is worth maintaining in the first place, especially given his affirmation of “equal aesthetic rights” in our “equal rights democracy.” Granting fragility to museums—“the museum collection serves the preservation of artifacts, but this collection itself is always extremely unstable”—does not help, since the privileged concepts and functions ladled on the museum surpass the scope of paradox, how paradox is actually played out. To insist that video installations bring the “great night” into the museum where its own light illumines “the darkness of the museum space” seems rather old-fashioned Idealism (41), even if couched in the discourse of the Sublime. In short, the idea that the “historical order” of things in a museum surpasses the “perceptual differences” of subjects idealizes museum experience.

Power and selection: Art Power insists that selecting an artwork to show and creating an artwork are indistinguishable—the installation is everything (95). But here too Art Power elides the politics it distances: “the artist or curator has a chance to demonstrate publicly his private sovereign strategy of selection” (94). How? Groys doesn’t say. He keeps analysis of the act of selection to the “purely private, individual and subjective” (94), but at the same time insists that “the artwork today does not manifest art; it merely promises art” (98). “Promise” seems thin for the resources devoted to making a thing into art. But as Nietzsche argued, to promise is an ascetic selection—and so Art Power, despite its embrace of contradiction and paradox, affirms what one could call a progressive conservatism. A paradox.