A shall-we-say contemporary creative artist, Philippe Thomas, tells us that, following the example set by Marcel Duchamp, we must all feel capable of being creators, taking this concept in its most radical sense, which means that we have to be capable of making something that never existed before us. And indeed, a work is or is not art according to the conception from which it is perceived. A Hottentot will never understand that his idols are anything other than transferred spirits. When the revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1917, they had no notion that on those walls there were works of art, and much less that the Palace itself was a piece of architecture worthy of a place in the history of art. The Madonna of Montserrat is a sacred image; in no way is it a work of art from the 12th century with greater or lesser artistic merit. The Concorde aircraft may be an excellent piece of engineering or a work of art, a Brancusi, of great subtlety. The concept implicit in visualisation determines – and the same could be said of sounds – what objects are works of art and what are not. Since our concepts are the product of an education embedded in a culture, it is that culture and its instruments – which include, in addition to the histories of art that explain it, the so-called art galleries but above all the museums (some of them erected contemporarily, deliberately, for that purpose) – which decide what are works of art and where they are to be found.

Faced with this practically irrefutable assertion, and in view of the history of mankind itself, which recovers through archaeology and ethnology everything that was no more than everyday habit and the need to survive, it is obvious that Philippe Thomas’ discourse becomes meaningful when he expressly states that it is the person who signs something – that is, who elevates something mass-produced out of the indifference of anonymity – who, by virtue of the credit our society endows on any work personalised and authenticated by a signature (to date the pre-eminent token of unique individuality), certifies that this is a work of art. When we authenticate, if we do so through a socially-acknowledged specialised body, we create works of art. Like Duchamp: whatever the support, even if it is a ready-made, something found, already established. And if any facet were lacking from this certification, we have the museums, created by societies for this type of special production, separated from the production of everyday use. It is to the museums, among the social groups considered by society itself to be inadequately instructed in the matter, where most people go to be told what works of art are. The objects displayed in these museum structures are those that the public must obligatorily consider works of art.

If any objection is presented to this judgment-proposition, the person formulating it may be considered an uncultured outsider still learning the workings of society, or a rebel who must therefore be watched and controlled with great attention, because he confronts the system of values which vertebrates any established society.

It is obvious that what we have said about museums and their relationship with the public – a social reality which, in the sense of masses of people (not of personalities of special or professional culture), originates from the times of the Enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century – determines and conditions what can be considered a work of art. Practice demonstrates that there is a permanent confrontation between a structure and a pressure by the masses. If both factors pertain to a society considered homogeneous, the conflict is diluted, since its elements intertwine. But if this bond does not exist – if the tastes of the museum and the public are not the same – then the museum building is nothing more than a storehouse of historical curiosities. We have to travel the world to understand that the concepts of visualisation are not the same everywhere, are not universal. The concepts with which we perceive, qualify and order culture have belonged to date to the ethnic groups and systems that regulate society, and each of these determines and implements its own principle of conceptual perception.

Arnau Puig
Philosopher and art critic