To feel sorry for oneself, because this world is not one’s own and one is being misunderstood, and even purposefully misconstrued, by the terrible others with which one shares the world. It is not even that the world is indifferent to one, but one has negative status in the hierarchy of beings. To feel sorry for oneself because one is not the spokesperson for a particular group of people one is expected to be, and this expectation confuses one’s actions for the actions of the group. A group with all kinds of silent prejudices and assumptions directed at it. To feel sorry for oneself for living in time and place where one’s particular work is not rewarded.
“Today I have very strong feelings. Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.“
– Gianni Infantino
This is how the president of FIFA opens a press conference ahead of the World Cup in Qatar. Infantino feels all these things because he himself came from a family of migrant workers, and was bullied for his freckles, red hair and Italian accent. During the press conference the president of FIFA feels sorry for himself because of the hardships he has endured, but probably more because nobody else seems to feel sorry for him. He’s been made into the villain of a World Cup with a questionable attitude towards human rights and terrible conditions for the migrant workers. Infantino’s quite obviously dishonest likening of his traumas to those abused in the run up to the World Cup is proof that FIFA is in Qatar on a humanitarian mission. Infantino wants us to be open to Qatar’s closedness. He wants us to give Qatar a chance to be open. He wants us to trust him as a person who has lived through the same abuses.
Putting obvious economical reasoning behind Infantino’s defence of Qatar aside, the defence itself is playing on European/western societies’ fondness of the concept of openness. A kind of new virtue. Open mind, open heart, open source, open bar, open end, open relationships, open borders, open 24/7 etc. It seems openness is central to western secular spirituality. An openness that stems from the knowledge that all men are created equal. You become superior to others by learning this. You pity others for not knowing this. Openness is understanding the indeterminate nature of the world. Openness is nirvana and liberation. Your openness holds space for those less open on their way to openness. These are of course clichés but they prove the point; openness is beautiful.
“Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein“
In the world ‘everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, – and if there were, it would be of no value.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
If ethics and aesthetics are one, which seems possible now that we have called openness beautiful, could I then maybe say we have an aesthetics of openness? To leave something open is a trick initially invented, I imagine, to make artworks feel more alive. If the world feels unresolved, resolved artworks feel insincere. For the modernist it was also, I imagine, necessary to relieve the artist from the position as bringer of truth; to return the truth to the ethereal after the loss of belief in religious authority. The truth is said to be somewhere inside of us. It is said to be subjective. Your truth is not any more true than anybody else’s truth. Whatever truth we are interested in when we use the word nowadays is in a sense open for interpretation. Nobody can be expected to agree, unless we make the field on which we are to agree upon Wittgenstein’s accidental world where “everything is as it is and happens as it does happen”.
I’m not sure exactly what this means for our museums and institutions, but it doesn’t seem good. If there is no system of values outside of the individual subjective one, are our massive art museums for the preservation and promotion of what is open for interpretation? In that case it feels hard to avoid the religious dimension of this subjectivity. In a roundabout way, this seems to mean that nobody who is participating in our culture actually understands it.
I could say I live in the most “open for interpretation” city on earth per capita; Basel. With just under 40 museums for 173,000 people, Basel could fit its entire population within its institutions. That in itself seems a difficult subject for open interpretation. The amount of Monets seems disproportionate to the city. The same with the amount of van Goghs, and Cézannes and so on. On the internet it says:
“Basel’s museums do not have a vast collection of Claude Monet’s work[…] Kunstmuseum Basel, generally focus on a broader range of art and may have only a few or no Monet paintings.”
Apparently, it is hard to find out how many Monets Basel has (if any) but I am sure that I saw some. I feel sure I saw six Monets. That’s roughly one Monet for every 29,000 people. Compare this to New York where there are 30 Monets for 8.258 million people, which makes one Monet for every 275,267 people. This means that Basel has roughly nine times more Monets than New York.Of course I’ve heard that Switzerland is a wonderful place to keep art because it is safe. The possibilities are quite high, judging from the last 100 years or so, that a political leader of any given nation rounds up all of the important art to destroy it, for any given reason. Or somebody could just bomb the museums in any given war situation. Of course this could never happen in Switzerland, because Switzerland does not have a political leader, and, more importantly, Switzerland is neutral to all conflicts which may involve them. Switzerland’s neutrality is ingrained in the national identity. In Switzerland, neutrality has to do with rationality, and something about all these museums presenting massive histories of radically subjective production results in a kind of museification of subjectivity. We know there is subjectivity but not for us. For us it is important to suppress the impulse and hold on to common ground. To feel sorry for others in their ignorance. To feel sorry for oneself because in difference to everyone else one’s own subjectivity is objective.
“we feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
This suppression is far from an exclusively Swiss trait. In fact, it’s fundamental to how we determine truth across the western world. An impartial media, whether possible or not, is the ideal. Subjective reporting is called propaganda. Scientific proof is the only acceptable measure for objective truth. What effect does this have on aesthetics? No matter how much brutalism hides itself behind function it cannot change the fact that it, as well, is an invention. No matter how much minimalism conceals the trace of the hand, it cannot change the fact that it, as well, is an invention. No matter how much research precedes the object, it cannot change the fact that it, as well, is an invention. No matter how little was done to the readymade, it cannot change the fact that it, as well, is an invention. No matter how automated an AI-generation is it cannot change the fact that it, as well, is an invention. No matter how accommodating an artwork is of different interpretations it cannot change the fact it, as well, is an invention. No matter how open your openness, it cannot change the fact that it, as well, is subjective. But we do not want our artists talking down to us. If all men are created equal, then nobody knows more than anybody else. In a democracy every vote is equal. Isn’t it about time that all museums, institutions, and galleries show and celebrate every artwork ever made by anyone?
Here the complaining stops. Because you can’t make poetry by advocating for poetry.
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Charles Benjamin Born 1989 in Stockholm. Lives and works in Basel.