the market, God and the avant-garde

The director of the Van Abbe Museum, Eindohoven, the Netherlands, Charles Esche says: “So I think for art and for artists, this is a new challenge. How to depict these invisible structures in visual forms? Can we make pictures of the market? Can we make pictures of the religious power? Not necessarily God, but the religious powers and how it operates in society. Can we structure it? How can we give up the avant-garde […]? How can we give that up without simply giving up to the Market and to God? Because that’s in a way what’s happened […]. When people have given up on the avant-garde, they said, what justifies one painting as a good painting, it’s not the future, it’s the fact that it’s sold.”