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

What about an artist who has a signature style? Does that become a kind of design?

Yes, it becomes what I call “self-design,” people branding themselves. People tend to do this; they mask themselves and create a kind of second body, an artificial body. Even in a very explicit way, like, say, Duchamp. Then again, some artists are permanently changing their style and permanently changing themselves, creating something like a fluid body, an uncertain identity.

In any case, I think what’s interesting is that these strategies for self-design are also inescapable for us. How we speak, how we behave, how we dress.

What do you think about the premise of the Parsons show — that democracy itself has become a brand?

Democracy has become a brand, no question about it, because it has a form. Everything that has a form is design. We have this kind of democratic design, and it has a tradition, coming from Ancient Rome, with a senate and congress and all this stuff. If we see those things, we think, “Oh, that’s democracy.” It’s like when we look at people in black and wearing Prada and Yamamoto and think, “Oh, that’s the art world.”

But is democracy as a brand still democracy?

Yes, but it’s democracy as a brand. If you have a form, if you have a brand, then some people are automatically excluded. They are excluded because they don’t look like democrats. And that’s why I say that modern art, 20th-century art, is more democratic that any political system. It opens the possibility to identify people who don’t look democratic as also part of society. What happens today is that a spectator looking at a country can immediately say: “Are the clothes the right ones — do they come from the right designer? Do they have a parliament? Do they have a judicial system like in America or France?” If the answers are yes, yes, and yes, then they are democrats.

I think that the problem with contemporary democracy is that is has become a system of easily identifiable signs, and this creates a tendency to dismiss something that looks different as not being a democracy.