About a Museum of Contemporary Art

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MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART. This text was written for a book timed to coincide with my gift to the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. It is less known than the gift to the Tretyakov Gallery. 54 works in the year 2000. Combined with the Ludwig gift and the museum's own collection of St. Petersburg artists, a branch of the State Russian Museum—a museum of contemporary art in the Marble Palace—was supposed to be created. Now it's unlikely. But maybe someday. One way or another, I removed the reflections, left only the pragmatics, and present it to your attention:

It seems that a gallery is the tool, and a museum is the goal. I will try to show the museum as a tool as well. Yes, the museification of an artist does not happen by his will (he is always ready), and he can hardly influence it. But still, by keeping the museum in mind as the addressee of your works, you can exert an influence.

First of all, you need to know that a museum of contemporary art is an invention of the 20th century, like the car, the telephone, or the airplane. Before that, museums collected and displayed exclusively the art of the past. The emergence of the MCA is connected to the fact that, starting from the end of the 19th century, the process of paradigm shifts in art began to accelerate. And if previously the changes of eras were somehow multiples of an artist's creative life—the first half of the century, the second half of the century, i.e., 50 years—here, from the Post-Impressionists up until the 70s of the last century, it became 20 years, 10 years, and even 5 years.

This quantitative change led to fundamental qualitative transformations. That is, the artist is still alive and capable of working, but is already a "cultural value"—and his works are "cultural heritage" and objects of collection by museums. And from that moment on, the museum becomes an active player. Previously, when it collected only the works of deceased or already incapacitated artists, it could not influence the process with its choice. Even the owner of a cafe, who fed some artists in exchange for drawings on napkins and didn't feed others, and thus carried out an artistic policy, was more influential than a museum professional.

To understand the scale of the changes, I will draw an analogy with the appearance of the Church in the 3rd century. Before that, a Christian, in search of answers on how to live righteously to GET TO HEAVEN, had to be in a constant search, in doubts, looking for a teacher, an interpreter. After the appearance of the Church, from council to council, rules, canons, approved interpretations, etc., began to appear. Act according to the guidelines of the Church, and you are sure that you are on the right path.

The artist appealed to the future in the same way a Christian appealed to heaven. "The future will appreciate it, I work for eternity." And there were also constant doubts, searches for like-minded people, insights. When the museum of contemporary art appeared, GETTING INTO THE FUTURE became simple: you need to be seen and appreciated by museum curators, since the museum is an institution whose main tasks include preserving and carrying into the future those items that enter the collection. (Now, 25 years later, the situation has changed, but not enough to rewrite this statement).

A super-expensive car in a hundred years will be a pile of scrap metal and will rot away, but a piece of paper with a drawing by an artist who got into a museum will be preserved, displayed, and restored.

Simultaneously, the acceleration of paradigm shifts in art led, in fact, to the emergence of what is today called the Art Business:

• It is clear that since the process of turning a "wet painting" (as recently created works are called at auctions, meaning "the paint has only just dried") into a cultural value is no longer 50 years, but 10 (in some cases even 5), investments became possible. Judge for yourselves, it is impossible to imagine a person buying a painting by a contemporary in the hope of getting rich in 50 years. But 5 and 10 years is a normal period for financial operations.Jasper Johns's work Target is bought for 5 thousand dollars, resold three years later for three hundred thousand, and another five years later for seven million.
• It is clear that an artist who has become a cultural asset while still alive and working becomes a factory guaranteed to produce masterpieces. In our country, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are criticized for this, but the first four factories were: Picasso, Dalí, Chagall, Matisse. The value of the works created by Picasso during his life is much greater than the value of Gazprom—with all its pipes and European contracts. (This was written 25 years ago; now it is much more. Now, let's say, half the value of Facebook).

The Museum of Contemporary Art became not just an important tool for the emerging market; it became its key element, one could say—the pinnacle:

• Expertise. But not the confirmation of authenticity; rather, the confirmation of significance. A guaranteed place in the future for museified artists (those in the collection) is the basis of market valuation. And today, this expertise is becoming the only clear guide.
• The institution of stars (blue chips)—through solo museum exhibitions. An important point here is that the museum, while playing an important role in the art market, plays itself in another market—entertainment—the business of serving free time. Millions of ordinary people learn about a particular artist only through museums. Children come to the museum and absorb the names of artists for life. All other art institutions are for professionals. (As always, there are exceptions. And not only radicals nailing their scrotums to the pavement, but, for example, the 4th-grade textbook Native Speech in Soviet times formed the stars of the Russian art market: Aivazovsky, Levitan, Vrubel, Vasnetsov, Serov, Repin—though, all the same, in cooperation with the Tretyakov Gallery).
• Last but not least: for the art market, the Museum is the only recycler. It is important to state here how the art market differs from other commodity markets, although items are also sold on it. Let us imagine a "market for jackets." If we know the number of men living in the city, know how many of them wear jackets, and most importantly, how long they wear one, we can calculate how many jackets need to be produced per year. Plus or minus the same amount that is thrown away as waste per year. If more is produced, the mechanism of fashion is launched: a jacket can still be worn, but it is green, and this season green is garbage. Throw it away and buy a magenta one. In the art market, "old jackets" are not thrown away; on the contrary, they become more expensive. Art that has ceased to be urgent (read: fashionable) precisely becomes commercially successful, and every new work competes with the old one, finding itself at a disadvantage. Such a market would face collapse if it were not for museums, which NEVER SELL WORKS that enter their collections—meaning they remove works from the market forever, clearing space for new authors. Practically all of Picasso is in museums, and the space for Hirst is vacant.

Below I will arrange in order what everyone already knows anyway. The Museum:

1. Collects a collection. From this point of view, they are all divided into "universal museums" and "unique" ones. To create a successful universal museum today is very expensive. Very, very, very expensive. Well, maybe the Emirates can. A unique museum is a field for finding one's own niche, one's own specificity, but also an assessment of one's own capabilities.
2. Organizes exhibitions. The constant struggle for space between the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions is the core of museum life. One of the most critical nerves. The production of a museum exhibition is expensive, so museums often exchange them. Sometimes it is a kind of museum business to produce blockbuster exhibitions that are then ordered by other museums.
3. Scientific, research, and educational work. The transformation of a work of art into a cultural value does not happen automatically. The research departments of museums are precisely the factories for producing the bricks of culture. It is clear that the mission of attribution in a museum of contemporary art is reduced to a minimum, but on the other hand, art historians of an MCA can be envied by art historians of traditional museums, since the artists are still alive and testify about themselves. Their archives are not thrown away and are transferred to research departments upon first request.
4. Forms a urban community around itself. This point is not as obvious to people outside the museum as the others. But for museum professionals, on the contrary, it often eclipses everything else )) The modern museum seeks to reduce the distance between the "museum employee" and the "viewer," forming various communities between them: volunteer movements, "friends of the museum," trustees, benefactors, partners. This is directly related to the complex system of museum financing. A typical system is the system of three thirds:

• The founder (city, country, wealthy person) finances the "costs of existence"—the building, staff employees, electricity, etc.
• The museum earns money itself for exhibitions and other programs.
• The Board of Trustees buys new works for the museum.

Engaging with contemporary art, an MCA often strives to become an artifact itself. This, of course, includes museum technologies, which today are very developed and sophisticated (if there is money), but first and foremost, it means unique buildings created by contemporary architects. In this pursuit, quite often museums do not collect art, but commission works from artists for specific, unique spaces: "site-specific."

The figure of the museum curator is highly mythologized. Today, even more than the gallerist, he is the character of all sorts of stories and conjectures about harassment and corruption. But let us remember that despite his influence, not a single curator can affect the consensus, simply because there are a thousand of them, and a conspiracy of such a number of characters is impossible.

On the other hand, all together, as a community of museum curators, they identify (or, more bluntly, set) trends and actually define "contemporary art" as the art that the museum community considers to be the art representing the present time. This is so determined that you arrive in a country for the first time, go to a museum, see the works of local authors whom you do not know, but you will definitely, without looking at the labels, determine when these works were created.

Having received such power over the artistic process, the museum naturally became a target for radical artists as well. The rebellion against the museum includes the Dadaists who created self-destroying works; it includes street art that rejects the museum as a mediator and wishes to communicate with the public not just directly, but also outside the artistic context; and it includes a large number of anti-museums—institutions created by artists who recognize neither museum expertise nor museum power over themselves, artists who refuse to consider entering eternity as their task. At the same time, the museum community is very flexible, and remembering that the start of contemporary art was given at the Salon des Refusés, it museifies the loudest and brightest rebels.

In the near future, I think, a strong transformation of the museum awaits us. Those that became symbols of the 20th century, like the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, the Tretyakov Gallery, and MoMA, will, of course, remain. Others will remain too, playing an important role in their city or region, but the main problem of the museum is too long-term planning, while processes in art are accelerating. Therefore, I am waiting for a new type of institution that corresponds more to the current artistic process. I am thinking about this.

P.S. The photo shows the ruins of the Guggenheim Museum in New York from the project by Vitaly Komar & +-.