The Magic of Artworlds (Three Scenes from Belgrade)

Abstract

Shall we leave the institutional system of art, while striving toward critical artistic practice or try to work within that system, which requires compromises and thus weakens our criticality? Or, shall we acknowledge that art is a social institution from the start, whereby fatalistic “either/or” looses its relevance?

Once we accept basic postulates of the institutional theory of art, a new set of problems regarding critical artistic doing and positioning of the art in society raises. This is the main purpose of this article, where I revisit some of the theses developed decades ago by Danto, Dickie, Wollheim, Carol and other institutional theorists mostly in the field of visual arts. However, in this article I don't exemplify these theses by performing arts nor do I try to further the institutional theory. I depart from discussions on the very concept of art characteristic of analytic philosophy and, by way of visiting three scenes from Belgrade, look closer into how art as social institution operates in practice. Since I work mostly in performing arts I focus on contemporary performing arts worlds and draw on that field to examine how “performativity“ works as a tool for an institutional analysis of art. From that perspective, I identified the following problems of artworlds as performative social institutions:

• Context (historical and social specificities): a discussion of the modes of work on the independent scene in Belgrade in 2000s and their political rationale;

• Extra-artistic aspects (which makes artworlds into heterotopias): a discussion on curating Bitef festival in the late 1960s and 70s; and

• Dynamic inner structure (where an artworld's per-formative authority depends on the responses by those involved): a discussion on the fugitive acts and extra-institutional scene that grew in Belgrade the 1990s.

Notes

2 In discussing art Weitz strongly referred to Wittgenstein and interpreted his idea of the family resemblances in the following way:

Card games are like board games in some respects but not in others. Not all games are amusing, nor is there always winning or losing or competition. Some games resemble others in some respects – that is all. What we find are no necessary and sufficient properties, only ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing,’ such that we can say of games that they form a family with family resemblances and no common trait. … The problem of the nature of art is like that of the nature of games, at least in these respects: If we actually look and see what it is that we call ‘art,’ we will also find no common properties – only strands of similarities. Knowing what art is is not apprehending some manifest or latent essence but being able to recognize, describe, and explain those things we call ‘art’ in virtue of these similarities. (Weitz 1956: 31)

3 To my knowledge, institutional theory recognizes only disciplinary differences, so Dickie, for instance, mentions the institution of the theatre (the theatre system), music, painting and other systems of the artworld (Dickie 1974).

4 The platform was active mostly from 2005 to 2010, but it has never ceased to exist officially. See: drugascena.wordpress.com

5 The festival is still running. See: festival.bitef. rs/about-the-festival

6 ‘I'd prefer not to’ is the answer that Melville's character Bartleby (in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A story of Wall Street’ (1853)) gave to any order he got from his boss. It became a landmark of passive resistance by those who have no capacity to change the macro-systems around them, nor a willingness to accept them.