Nicolas Bourriaud: Postproduction, 2002

In Postproduction, I try to show that artists’ intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond what we call ‘the art of appropriation,’ which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing. The Museum like the City itself constitute a catalog of forms, postures, and images for artists – collective equipment that everyone is in a position to use, not in order to be subjected to their authority but as tools to probe the contemporary world. There is (fertile) static on the borders between consump- tion and production that can be perceived well beyond the borders of art. When artists find material in objects that are already in circula- tion on the cultural market, the work of art takes on a script-like value: ‘when screenplays become form,’ in a sense.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. New York, NY: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002.
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