Boris Groys

Courtesy New Museum

Boris Groys giving a talk for the New Museum’s "Night School" series, January 31, 2008

Andy Warhol Jeff Koons Marcel Duchamp Kasimir Malevich Investors Indulge Appetite for Luxury Crazy for Koons Dealer Holly Solomon’s Papers Headed to Smithsonian Phillips de Pury Makes Its (Small) Mark

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Born in East Berlin in 1947, Groys is quite familiar with the Soviet system. He studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Leningrad from 1965 to 1971, was a research assistant in that city for five years, then moved to Moscow, where he immersed himself in the unofficial art scene, coining the term “Moscow conceptualism.” In 1981, he immigrated to West Germany and completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Münster; he has since positioned himself as an expert on late-Soviet postmodern art and the Russian avant-garde, authoring several books, including The Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, and, most recently, Art Power.

Groys now splits his time between teaching posts in the southwestern German city of Karlsrühe and New York and is well-known on the international art scene as a curator and creator of “video collages.” Tonight he will deliver this year’s John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture at Parsons the New School for Design, on the topic of “Art in the Age of Democracy.”

ARTINFO caught up with the artist-philosopher by phone last week. He spoke about branding Obama, “designing” oneself, and how Prada is to the art world as parliament is to democracy.

Boris, the promotional material for tonight’s talk at Parsons says that you’ll be discussing art and democracy, the difference between art and design, and the relationship between aesthetics and conspiracy theory. Can you sum up these themes?

What really interests me is the situation of art and politics. I refer in my talk to a famous passage in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which he distinguishes between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art. The aestheticization of politics is what we would call branding, or design, which presents politics as a seductive spectacle. It’s the same idea as Guy Debord’s “society as spectacle.” Politics becomes a way to seduce people, which can actually lead to fascism and war.

On the other hand, the politicization of art is a way to get free of that and to act purely politically — beyond aesthetics, beyond art, beyond seduction, beyond spectacle. The question is: Is this possible?

Nowadays, politics doesn’t need art to become aestheticized, because in addition to art, we have mass culture, mass media coverage, and other types of image production, but that does precisely mean that art finds politics on the latter’s own territory and can offer an aesthetic criticism of it. And yet to aestheticize something is also to discredit it.

Take the case of Obama. Everyone who wants to say something bad about Obama says that he’s a showman — they aestheticize him. Everyone who wants to say something good about Obama says that he’s a real person.

To look at something as being aestheticized is to look at it as intrinsically bad. It’s not seen, as many suggest, as seductive or enchanting; rather, it becomes loaded with mistrust and suspicion.

Is there a distinction between something being aestheticized and something having aesthetic qualities?

There is a difference, but the difference is only who is doing the aestheticizing. Something can be aestheticized before it goes to a consumer, or something can be aestheticized by the consumer.

In an interview with the publication Art Lies you said: “Art, in general, is nothing but failed or dysfunctional design.” Can you explain this?

If you look at what we call art history, it started at the end of the 18th or beginning of the 19th century with the creation of museums like the Louvre and the British Museum. If you go into these museums, you’ll see that the art collections are actually design collections. Consider the collections of furniture, or religious statues, or icons, or portraits  — these are not art but a kind of design. It’s even true for the 20th century: The really important art of the 20th century was design — like Russian constructivism or Bauhaus — in terms of its production of an image for a new society. What is shown in museums and galleries are fragments of this design, and we interpret these as art.