On the Documentary, the Aura and the Emergency Incident of an Art Auction

The notion of authenticity in arts may be treated in a variety of ways theoretically as well as practically, and I will not present a complete survey of this complexity. Something may be true – or supposedly untrue – which can be spoken of as a new way of perceiving new developments within arts. It is related to the question of new authenticity and the political as result of the free play with irony and effects, something close to allowing illusion to be something to play with in a manner reflecting the virtual character of illusion as he does French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. (cfr. Baudrillard 1999.) The project of a post capitalist auction by Jingyi Wang is situated within this reflection.

According to Baudrillard´s theory of the simulacrum, it is legitimate to talk of a re-making of reality, in which search for fervency and truth will necessarily have to take an illusory enacted character which is reflecting and playing upon the surface so characteristic of post-modern art in general, with all its criticism of authenticity as romantic cliché – and as such a transparent phenomenon.

Such a project is a not a question of pretending and not pretending, but rather a question concerning the commodification of the arts, which can also be seen as an elaboration of truth. By the real time “fictionalizing” of truth with reference to post capitalism and the art auction, there is a new way of establishing a fictional contract with the audience. It is the matter of a conscious search for circumstances and contexts that invite us to feel the individual as being “authentically” present in such a project, as something fictional on the edge to becoming a real situation. The artist’s subjective statement is in an immersive exchange with the audience, in which the artist is able to transfer to the viewer or participant/spectator the experience of taking part in an interactive and virtual play which at the same time will be perceived of as real.

This PCA Catalogue gives you an overview and understanding of aspects of art and its commodification. In this preface to the catalogue, I find it necessary to take a look on how a term like authenticity is treated in a European continental and modern aesthetic philosophical and aesthetic tradition, and thus give the legitimacy for how to use of the term in the manner this presentation requires. Walter Benjamin has claimed that a thing’s authenticity is the essence of what may be derived from a durability imprinted by its function as “silent witness” and expression of experienced history. (Benjamin 2001 168-169.) This is an authenticity conveyed as sort of “the aura of things”, the charisma from something of patina, or something apparently pure or authentic. Richard Shusterman says it so: “/…/Such experience had what Walter Benjamin called aura, a cultic quality resulting from the artwork’s uniqueness and distance from the ordinary world.” (Shusterman 2000 18.)

An art auction can have such qualities when it transgresses the capitalistic dimension, and thus turns into a post capitalistic auction. It is a performative event on the edge of something more – it is pointing towards a more idealistically turn of the fictional contract of performance to shed light upon the commodification of the arts and how to make it post capitalistic by changing the rules of the auction, from bidding with money to bidding with art objects or gifts. This even resembles the powwow of the North American Indians or west coast aboriginal people, which was a feast of exchanging gifts which was forbidden by the US American authorities. They thought it would corrupt the aboriginals in direction of not being able to deal or act in a capitalistic way.

The question is how art can be compared to such a situation, if we speak about an art auction as a replica of a real auction. Then it lies on the verge to compare the feeling of authenticity through comparing the direct encounter with a fake encounter. For instance, in the primary encounter with architectonical replicas like in California, with all its copies of European architecture. In an essay, the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco is exemplifying the degree of proximity to what affects you, and that primary or authentic exposure to arts compared to the secondary or tertiary encounter. Eco puts it this way:

“/…/But the fact is that our journey into the Absolut Fake, begun in the spirit of irony and sophisticated repulsion, it now exposing us to some dramatic questions…The condition for the amalgamation of fake and authenticity is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as vulnerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries.” (Eco 2001 404.)

Out of this, Eco deduces a final momentum; the absolute “deception”, what will possibly be present in pop-culture through its play on kitsch and pastiche. This deception may be said to be manifest in post-modern art’s playing with surface and the virtual. This play has produced a reaction transgressing mere cultivation of surface, and in “our” case the surface of a post capitalist auction. Such a reaction will in the case of PCA be produced by performance as an auction based in an immersive interaction using new concepts of communication. We will in this project simply experience an auction which is as real as can be. So, I would speak about it as a reality fiction based in the study of commodity value of the art, presented as a performance addressing the audience and teaching them stories of a different art market as an expression of post capitalist emergency.

– Knut Ove Arntzen, professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen and a theatre critic.

References:

Baudrillard, J., Revenge of the Crystal. Selected writings on the modern object and its destiny, 1968–1983, London 1999: Pluto Classics.

Benjamin, W., “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions”, Continental Aesthetics. Kearny, R. og D. Rasmussen (ed.) Continental Aesthetics. Romanticism to Postmodernism. An Anthology. Oxford 2001: Blackwell Publisher.

Eco, U., “Travels in Hyperreality”, I , Kearny, R. og D. Rasmussen (ed.) Continental Aesthetics. Romanticism to Postmodernism. An Anthology. Oxford 2001: Blackwell Publisher.

Kearny, R. og D. Rasmussen (ed.) Romanticism to Postmodernism. An Anthology. Oxford 2001: Blackwell Publisher.

Shusterman, R., Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd edition with a special introduction and a new chapter, New York 2000: Rowman and Littlefield.