Zentralmuseumskunst

Let us consider art policy, generally understood as the set of measures a central museum takes to control society’s imagination by managing the supply of art and limiting the permissible/valid fictions. Although these are its only real levers, the Central Museum effectively uses them to control inflation and ensure artistic stability (formerly the classic task of the academy, then of the market, now of the Central Museum). This, in turn, influences the problem of history, the relationship between history and criticism, and the respective complexity of the available justifications for relevance and the creation of the artistic, material-semiotic apparatus. Ultimately, it is about the resilience of the hierarchical network of human hearts and minds, for today the tasks of art policy extend far beyond its institutionalized sphere: art policy has become the central organizing principle that shapes geostrategy, domestic policy, social relations, and the narratives of everyday reality. In economics, politics, and societies, the ideal of equilibrium as a measure and means of control no longer prevails; rather, they must be actively steered by being kept permanently and thoroughly out of balance (see Crisis Machine). Why? Because balance would reveal the impossibility of realizing the prevailing images. A solution in the sense of the emergence of a new system in which contingent events would be reliably contained is not in sight for the time being, unless one considers the elimination of the subjectivity of the now, that is, the perspectivity of time.