In 2011, a loose group of “grumpy futurists” wrote up an extensive list of “Alternatives to the Singularity” in a collaborative Google Document. “The Singularity”, in popular culture and belief, refers to the point where machine intelligence leave humans behind. Its most prominent exponent is the engineer and techno-evangelist Ray Kurzweil, its most prominent institution the Singularity University think tank initiated by Kurzweil and sponsored, among others, by Google.1 Against the techno-optimistic Singularity gospel, the grumpy futurists sketched dystopian visions such as the “Songularity” where ubiquitous auto-tune software will not only manipulate all music, but also every spoken voice.2 Many of those alternative singularities have become true in the meantime, such as the “Re-Bootularity” where all “future movies will either be a re-boot OR re-boot of a re-boot, re-boot with a twist, prequel or sequel of an existing movie” or the “Droneularity” where drones encroach everything from “Pakistan, to the U.S./Mexico border, and soon, your local 7/11 parking lot”.3

The fifty alternative singularities sketched in the document are all potentially contained in one of them, the “Crapularity”, if one broadly understands Crapularity as everything that is about to go wrong in the “Singularity”. In the collective document, the anthropologist Justin Pickard defines it more narrowly as:

“3D printing + spam + micropayments = tribbles that you get billed for, as it > replicates wildly out of control. 90% of everything is rubbish, and it’s all > in your spare room - or someone else’s spare room, which you’re forced to > rent through AirBnB”.4

If one leaves aside technological details like 3D printing and Airbnb storage, then the Crapularity also describes collections of gallery and museum art that pile up in the spare rooms of the art systems, i.e. the museums depots whose size continually grows in relation to exhibition space and the tax-free airport storage facilities that private collectors nowadays use. With each new work of art bought, depot storage proportionally increases in comparison to the art that still remains publicly visible and accessible. Its physical conditions and affordances limit replication. Withdrawal from public view is the necessary precondition for maintaining the fiction of scarcity upon which the conventional art market relies - and without which its prices could not be justified.

In a more general sense, the crapularity is a form of accumulation of capital. Since this capital consists of “rubbish”, the crapularity reenacts the subprime crisis and its financialization of worthless credit and junk assets. In combination with newer digital technologies, contemporary art thus becomes “fintech”, that is, “financial technologies” developed outside traditional banking and asset management.

Forever Rose

Forever Rose

Art Fin-tech

On Valentine’s Day of 2018, the digital photograph Forever Rose became the “world’s most valuable piece of virtual artwork ever sold”.5 It raised more than $1 million from a group of ten buyers who had bought it with two cryptocurrencies. One of the two currencies was created by the photographer of the picture, Kevin Abosch, himself. According to the press release, “Forever Rose is an ERC20 token called ROSE on the Ethereum blockchain that is based on Mr Abosch’s photograph of a rose. The buyers each receives [sic] 1/10 of the ROSE token, as ERC20 tokens are divisible. They can then choose to hold their portion, sell it, or give it as a special gift for Valentine’s Day or any other special occasion”.6

The combination of Blockchain technology hype and stock photography kitsch makes it easy to dismiss Forever Rose. On first sight, it is crapular material for future camp shows of late 2010s bad taste. Aside from this specific (and admittedly crappy) example, blockchain technology has become a major subject of discussion in contemporary art, first through the efforts of London’s non-profit art organization Furtherfield and later by master curator Hans Ulrich Obrist via his interview with Ethereum blockchain founder Vitalik Buterin in the spring 2018 issue of TANK Magazine 7. Forever Rose thus proves and even eclipses the “strange new future” that an article in the October 2017 issue of ArtReview had predicted, a future in which “art collectors and dealers will no longer worry about buying, selling, shipping and storing artworks. Instead, such works will all disappear into freeport vaults, while galleries and investors speculate on the rising value of a Jeff Koons or a Gerhard Richter, trading blockchain certificates with each other”.8 Forever Rose did not even need to be stored in a freeport vault, since it is a digital photograph that has not even been printed.

Updated through fintech, the contemporary art market finally catches up with modern capitalism: Buyers will be able to “short” an art work or artist, such as Jeff Koons and Liam Gillick, by betting on their future loss of value. The number of art buyers will greatly increase when ownership no longer entails possession of an entire artwork, but only of shares traded on stock markets. Forever Rose could then be the first example of an emerging subprime art market. There will be derivatives of these stocks, such as credit default swaps, as they already exist for cryptocurrencies. Will Forever Rose become the equivalent of the tulip in the 17th century Dutch tulipomania investment bubble? What will the ripple effects be of crashing derivatives? Financial institutions and whole countries could collapse when such a Great Contemporary Art Bubble bursts; it would no longer be the one that Ben Lewis had dissected in his 2009 documentary film,9 which was still limited to a small number billionaires scamming each other over their old-school private Damien Hirst investments.

Until recently, the contemporary art market was based on the same economics as in the 16th to 19th century, with oligarchs accumulating artworks as their private material possessions; works that were often produced in the same types of workshops, in the same media of painting and sculpture and (in the case of Damien Hirst) even with similar iconography as Renaissance and baroque workshop art. Freeport art vaults are just the latest incarnation of this old-school market. Aside from their off-shore location, they do not differ much from the castles and mansions where aristocrats and the wealthy bourgeoisie locked away the artworks they had bought. Contemporary artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl calls this “Duty-Free Art” in her homonymous book. She characterizes the underground airport depots where it is stored to evade taxation and be exclusively accessible to owners as zones of “permanent transit”: “They travel inside a network of tax-free zones and also inside the storage spaces themselves”, based on their change of ownership.10 This travel is best exemplified by Flip City, a series of forty digital paintings by contemporary artist Jonas Lund created in 2014 in the style of “processed-based abstraction”, also known as “Zombie Formalism”,11 a short contemporary art hype in that year. Back then, collector Stefan Simchowitz became notorious as a “flipper”, a collector who quickly bought and sold - “flipped” - works of emerging artists he had discovered. In Flip City, Lund not only digitally remixed existing Zombie Formalist works, but more importantly attached a GPS device to each painting in order to track its relocations in its process of being flipped. Each of the paintings and the changes of its locations are documented and tracked on Lund’s website flip-city.net.

The turnover of Lund’s paintings and the frequency of Simchowitz’ flip trades, however, were nostalgically slow in comparison to computerized, algorithm-controlled millisecond-flash trades on stock markets at that time, let alone the trading of CryptoKitties three years later, a game that combined Tamagochi and trading cards by having its players raise and swap virtual cats that exclusively existed in the Ethereum blockchain and whose appearance was determined by algorithmically simulated genetic mutation.12 In late 2017, CryptoKitties trade had a volume of $3 million, overloaded the entire Ethereum infrastructure with several ten thousand kitties in the transaction queue, likely causing the electricity consumption of a middle-size city through the power-intensive cryptographic computation required for each transaction.13 From Bush-era billionaire trade of Damien Hirst’s and Jeff Koons’ neo-Rubens art via Obama-era 2010s Zombie Formalism in the underground flip cities of airport vaults to Trump-era digital roses and kitties, art markets have evolved from feudalist to fin tech economies within only a decade.

What is Contemporary?

This seems to invalidate McLuhan’s media theory credo of contemporary artists as “seismographs” of larger cultural, technological and social developments, unless one redefines the currently most common definitions of “artist” and declares today’s memers the genuine contemporary artists of our time. (Not unlike a century ago when the artists who define the modernist art history canon largely worked outside recognized art institutions.) If one accepts the memers as contemporary artists, then the development from Damien Hirst to CryptoKitties is not only one of different market models, but also of different concepts of the artist: from the classical big name artist via pump-and-dump Zombie Formalist artists (who may have been as quickly forgotten as they rose to fame yet still had names and signatures) to the no-name artists of anonymous meme collectives, whether as creators of mutating CryptoKitties, as “Alt-Right” infowar trolls creating Pepe the Frog memes, or as a combination of both, such as in the creation of collectible “Rare Pepe” memes on the Bitcoin blockchain.14

Yet in all instances, the signature dichotomy of contemporary art is kept in place: Contemporary art is simultaneously abundant (literally, in the sense of there being too much of it so that most of it ends up in some kind of storage, whether of museums, airports or hard drives) and artificially kept scarce, (a) through the economics of the single-copy artwork in gallery art (nowadays including most video art which, in order to keep its collector’s value, is not available on DVD or online), (b) through the illusion of autographs in Zombie Formalism and its meta-joking, digital institutional critique derivatives, or (c) through the limitation of the number of mutations and the use of digital crypto signatures and owner authentication stamps on memetic blockchains, such as in the proverbial Rare Pepes that, according to their creator Altpeter, demonstrate “the ability to enforce digital scarcity for the first time”.15

All this could be called “contemporary art” in the most literal sense of art that not only depicts, but enacts contemporary culture in all its glory and misery, highs and lows. Yet doing so, it contradicts the arguably most widespread and influential definition of contemporary art within the contemporary art system itself. Its coiner (no blockchain pun intended) is the philosopher Peter Osborne. According to Osborne, “Contemporary art is post-conceptual art”.16 In Osborne’s definition, “contemporary” no longer is a generic attribute referring to all art that is currently being made, but it becomes a particular philosophical and historical concept. Philosophically, “contemporary” is defined by Osborne in the most literal sense of the word, as a shared time (con-temporary) among generations. It thus differs from modernity which Osborne reads as a “more structurally transitory category”, in the sense that it does not emphasized shared time but disruption of time.17 Historically, “contemporary art” comes after “modern art” for Osborne: “It is the fictional ‘presentness’ of the contemporary that distinguishes it from the more structurally transitory category of modernity”.18

For Jean Baudrillard, the conspiracy of art was its collusions.19 Today, the conspiracy of contemporary art is that its curators and the large audience (that often includes artists who think of themselves as contemporary artists) actually mean two different things with the same words. Most people in “contemporary art” who understand the term as a generic description of art currently made are likely unaware of the actual benchmarks that curators and institutions use to qualify something as “contemporary art” in Osborne’s sense, i.e. as the “post-conceptual art” shown at biennials, Documenta and in contemporary art centers. Art theorists like Suhail Malik and Armen Avanessian and artists like Liam Gillick now even talk about “postcontemporary” art.20 For Gillick, contemporary art “has become historical, a subject for academic work” and is identified with a period between “1973 and 2008”,21 more or less in line with Osborne’s “post-conceptual” characterization. Osborne furthermore identifies contemporary art with a particular institutional framework: “the inter- and transnational characteristics of an art space have become the primary markers of its contemporaneity”.22 Contemporary art is, in other words, more defined by its institutional framework than by its practice. As a result, that what the Institutional Critique from the Art Workers’ Coalition to Andrea Fraser had described as a shortcoming of the contemporary art system, now becomes its distinctive mark. Or, to use a computer-cultural phrase: the bug has become a feature.

Osborne supplements this definition with six formal criteria for contemporary art, (1) “conceptuality”, (2) an “aesthetic dimension”, (3) “anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials”, (4) the extension of “the possible material forms of art” (as opposed to medium-specific art like painting), (5) a “relational” unity of the artwork “across the totality of its multiple material instantiations”, and (6) a “historical malleability of the borders of this unity”.23 All criteria considered, contemporary art is, for Osborne, “post-conceptual” art that has 1960s/1970s as it historical point of departure, but softens its conceptualism by reintroducing other aesthetic qualities.24

The six criteria amount to a formula for the curation of Biennials and contemporary art spaces as well as for the insider knowledge to be taught in postgraduate art study programs that transform artists from naive B.A.-level practitioners to “contemporary artists”. This may simply be a manner of writing a proper artist’s statement for which, according to Steyerl, “UK and US educational franchises, charging students $17,000 a year to learn proper English, have slowly started competing with the city’s own admittedly lousy, inadequate, and provincial free art schools”.25 These are not merely the conditions of contemporary art, but also of its other ‘critical theory’ whose proper language is being taught to those future art critics, theorists and curators who can afford the respective schools. A colleague of mine who teaches at an Ivy League university said that she and her colleagues teach Marxism to millionaire kids - whereas my vocational public school in Rotterdam teaches entrepreneurship to working-class kids.

Critical theory aesthetics

As opposed to the feudalist condition of contemporary art being “whatever those in positions of cultural power said was art”,26 Osborne at least makes an effort of conceptually defining and laying open the criteria of admittance to and distinction within the field of contemporary art.

Contemporary art as “post-conceptual art” is a close cousin of another, historically older collusion of critical theory-informed aesthetic philosophy and a school of art, namely Neue Musik. Literally meaning “new music”, the term could be easily mistaken as a generic descriptor of any newly made music, just as contemporary art could be mistaken for just meaning what it says. But since Theodor W. Adorno (himself an upper class Marxist) and his Philosophie der neuen Musik (translated as Philosophy of Modern Music) from 1949, “Neue Musik” has become a rather narrowly defined field, discourse and tradition.27 It mostly stands for contemporary, atonal music composed by classically trained composers from Stockhausen and Boulez to Ferneyhough and Lachenmann, with the indeterminist music of John Cage and others and the minimal music of La Monte Young and company as its outliers. For Adorno’s Neue Musik, Schönberg’s twelve-tone music is the historical and conceptual point of departure just as conceptual art is the point of departure for Osborne’s notion of contemporary art. And just as much as the “characteristics of the art space” define contemporary art for Osborne, concert halls and public radio defined Neue Musik after Adorno. Much contemporary criticism and theory of Neue Musik - in periodicals such as MusikTexte, Musik & Ästhetik, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik and Melos - maintains Adorno’s credo of Neue Musik as lived resistance against mass cultural commodification (including popular music). Until recently, some of this criticism even preserved the signature sound and stylistic mannerisms of Adorno’s German writing.28

Both “contemporary art” and “Neue Musik” ultimately rest on aesthetic autonomy and the spaces granting and protecting it. This fact has been addressed by institutional critique in contemporary art for several decades; yet this critique was mostly concerned with the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in art spaces and rarely addressed white cube art as a problem per se. In Neue Musik, an institutional critique has manifested only recently with such younger composers as Johannes Kreidler who, among others, outsourced a commissioned piece to a Chinese and to an Indian composer.29 In a recent, angry op-ed piece against Kreidler’s “conceptualism” (here we see the generational difference of Neue Musik at work), composer Helmut Lachenmann insists that “autonomous music” answers “in timeless innocence and intensity to a reality that is foreign to this music, thus reminding it of the utopia of our humanity”.30 In the older discourse of Neue Musik, the late-romanticist roots of critical theory are thus more openly present than in the newer-generation anglophone critical theory that defines post-conceptual “contemporary art”. Still, the conclusion of Osborne’s Philosophy of Contemporary Art strongly echoes Adorno’s aesthetic theory (of autonomous art as commodification resistance) as well, and expresses the same hope as Lachenmann’s, only in more prosaic language: “At its best, contemporary art models experimental practices of negation that puncture horizons of expectation”.31

The timelessness and utopias that Lachenmann reclaims for “autonomous music” are, in any case, difficult to claim for a field that is as commodified and influenced by economic collusions of institutions and the market as contemporary art, no matter whether it’s the kind of contemporary art made by Jeff Koons or the one defined by Osborne.32

The Crapularity is here

Crapularity aesthetics thus concerns contemporary art that may or may not be in bed with critical theory, but for which commodification critique - as a critique of not just the subject matters, but also the ontology and economy of artworks - has been given up. In other words, it does not matter for the crapularity of a (figurative) pig whether the lipstick of critical theory or institutional critique has been put on it or not. Andrea Fraser’s 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, a documentation of the political contributions of museum trustees in the 2016 American presidential elections, is just no different from Jeff Koons’ inflatable pigs in that respect, because they both are commodities that “replicate wildly out of control”. Neue Musik, while representing an older form of critical theory aesthetics, deserves credit for resisting commodification, including that of itself. Brian Ferneyhough’s work has no commodity value to speak of, unlike Liam Gillick’s.

An interesting historical detail in this context is Fluxus and the fact that it nominally did not begin as an art movement, but in 1962 under the moniker of “Neueste Musik” (“Newest Music”).33 Its core group consisted of former students of John Cage’s and Morton Feldman’s composition class at New School in New York, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s student Nam June Paik and orchestra musician Ben Patterson. “Neue Musik” was thus the original reference for the early beginnings of a performative and conceptual art tradition that conversely became the point of reference for “contemporary art”. (Even the term “concept art” was coined by a member of Fluxus, Henry Flynt.) What Lucy Lippard called the “Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972” in the subtitle of her book Six Years34 thus began four years earlier and amounted to dematerialization only if one took visual art, not musical performance as its discursive framework.

Lippard’s term made a lot more sense in its own time where conceptual art, with its derivation of performances and artworks from instructional scores, paralleled the “linguistic turn” in philosophy and the humanities.35 Retrospectively, however, the term “dematerialization” is problematic if not wrong from both a dialectical- and an ontological-materialist perspective - i.e., both from viewpoint of critical theory from Marx to Adorno and of fundamental ontology from Heidegger to Speculative Realism, since the practices described by Lippard and others did not change the material conditions of art as such. Rather than dematerializing art, they decommodified it, most radically in Fluxus where George Maciunas’ main occupation was to think up and try out “nonprofessional, nonparasitic, nonelite” art with communist business models for artist cooperatives.36 Even in the later, more mainstream practices of performance art, land art, artists’ books, video and new media art, art market commodification remained difficult, since its objects either do not fit depots or have less collector value because of their mass media reproducibility.

From Fluxus to Art Basel (with its close neighborhood to the freeport depots of Zurich and Luxembourg) and meme blockchains coupled to speculative crypto currencies, the decommodification of art has been a hopelessly lost cause. Retrospectively, it looks like a failed Hegelian utopia, including the one of the “end of art” which Hegel had predicted in his aesthetic philosophy and which Maciunas tried to achieve in a populist manner by ending art through a “substitute art-amusement”.37 The Singularity is another such Hegelian redemption narrative whose reality of computer crashes, incompatibilities, quick digital obsolescence, permanent system updates, alt-right bots and other malware is more adequately described by the word ‘Crapularity’.

In that respect, Singularity and Crapularity relate to each other in the same way as “socialism” and Eastern Bloc “real socialism”. In capitalism and its art markets, the Crapularity manifests itself, to paraphrase Stefan Heidenreich, as a commodification of object-oriented ontology as “Freeportism”.38 For Heidenreich, these philosophies perfectly offered themselves as “the ideology of freeportism and its associated modes of artistic production and circulation”; among others, because the “metaphysical conception of objecthood” in object-oriented ontology, where objects speak by and for themselves, “bears a striking resemblance to the requirements for things to be stored in a freeport”.39

If one draws a general conclusion from the specific example of freeportism, then the Crapularity can be broadly described as the evil little brother of object-oriented ontologies. It is an ontology of encroaching and accumulating objects and once-proclaimed “immaterials” (to use a term by Jean François Lyotard40) that return as zombies. Its examples include conceptual art that ends up as “post-conceptual” art in freeports, the Internet mutating into a crapular “Internet of Things” (made up of throwaway and criminally insecure networked gadgets), Linux and Open Source ending up as cost-free software infrastructure for two billion crapular Android devices and two billion Facebook accounts. The crapularity now also includes the way utopian economic experiments - from the self-sustaining communities in the Arts and Crafts movement, Maciunas’ Fluxus projects to the experimental “Knochengeld” currency in 1993 East Berlin41 - return as the zombies of Bitcoins and Rare Pepes. The ramifications of the Crapularity are thus ethical, financial-technological, ecological, political and - as “Forever Rose” shows - aesthetic.

A recent case of the Crapularity involves the zombie return of former situationist Jacqueline de Jong, conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner and General Idea co-founder AA Bronson (next to such usual art system suspects as Liam Gillick, Marina Abramović and Rem Koolhaas) as signatories of a public demand for the return of ex-director Beatrix Ruf to Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Ruf had moonlighted as an art consultant for a billionaire collector while having been on the payroll of the public institution. Maybe the artists found this a lesser evil to their work being dematerialized like in the 1960s, or ending up in freeport storage, or as CryptoKitties in blockchains. The humanistic form of the written and signed appeal published in a newspaper was, however, hopelessly dated in an age of social media crapularity.

In the Crapularity, commodification and accumulation follow the same out-of-control logic as unread invitations for gallery exhibition openings filling up E-Mail in-boxes. But the accumulated Crapularities of the contemporary art systems still appear benign in comparison to those created by Bitcoin mining, throwaway gadget production and other forms of large-scale waste. Yet it is symptomatic that contemporary art is seemingly only able to embody but not systemically escape this condition, thus putting major question marks behind any claim of being radically critical. Contemporary art suffers, in other words, from the same blindness as critical theory that is being taught in exclusive schools and published under the commodity regime of traditional authorship and intellectual property. Taking contemporary posthumanist thinkers as their example, Janneke Adema and Gary Hall point out how “their ways of being and doing as theorists, far from displacing humanism and the human, remain resolutely humanist - and not all that interested in the actual material nature and agency of their texts, ironically enough.”42

All these shortcomings boil down to a conflict between a stated epistemology (or concepts, or metaphysics) and ontological conditions, respectively ecologies. The same conflict is present in the Singularity as a metaphysical concept versus the Crapularity as an ecological condition. So is contemporary art that lives up to its name only left with the options of reflecting the Crapularity in crapular ways or ecology in ecologically sensible ways?

Fluxus was, again, ahead of its time when its associate Henry Flynt anticipated and outdid pretty much all of anthropocene art in his 1968 pamphlet Overthrow the Human Race:

“We, the REALISTS, accuse humanity of the following inherent biosocial defects:

  1. Predisposition to oligarchic social organization.

  2. Perpetual division between exceptional individuals (leaders, heretics, etc.) and the herd-like masses.

  3. Asymmetry of the sexes, resulting in perpetual male primacy.

  4. Perpetual war and preparations for war, including preparations for the self-extermination of the species.

  5. Persistent problems concerning sexual adjustment.

The evidence is overwhelming that humanity is biosocially irrational. (The recent possibility of war between Communist countries is only another confirmation.) “Social problems” can only be solved outside the biological limits of human beings as social animals. Loyalty to the human species is absurd. Genuine commitment to the solution of “social problems” requires the overthrow of humanity“.43

For these problems, Flynt proposed the following solutions:

“1) Forming an alliance with a superior life-form from outer space to attack the human race.

  1. Building intelligent, self-reproducing machines which will overthrow humanity.

  2. Causing mutations in animals, producing intelligent species which will > rise up against their human oppressors.

  3. Causing mutations in humanity that will transform it beyond recognition.

  4. Starting a thermonuclear ‘spasm’ war that will decisively transform human consciousness (and possibly biology)“.44

Since these radical measures add up to a weaponized Crapularity, if they do not offer an escape from the Crapularity as such.


Bibliography

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—. Philosophy of Modern Music. Reprint edition, Continuum, 2007.

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Hillen, Brittany. “Crypto-Art ‘Forever Rose’ Photo Sells for $1M, Making It the World’s Most Valuable Virtual Art.” DPReview, 19 Feb. 2018, https://www.dpreview.com/news/6617425004/crypto-art-forever-rose-photo-sells-for-1m-making-it-the-world-s-most-valuable-virtual-art.

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Lachenmann, Helmut. “Komponieren am Krater.” MusikTexte, vol. 151, 2016, pp. 3–5.

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  1. (Kurzweil)

  2. (Raford et al.)

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. (Hillen)

  6. Ibid.

  7. (Catlow et al.); (Obrist)

  8. (Charlesworth)

  9. (Lewis)

  10. (Steyerl)

  11. Walter Robinson, Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184

  12. (Hertig)

  13. An issue that (Obrist) addresses in his interview with the founder of Ethereum, too.

  14. (Faife)

  15. Ibid.

  16. (Osborne, 37)

  17. (Osborne, 24)

  18. ibid.

  19. (Baudrillard)

  20. (Avanessian and Malik), (Gillick)

  21. ibid.

  22. (Osborne, 27)

  23. Osborne, 48

  24. In Osborne’s words, contemporary art “reflects the historical experience of conceptual art” (Osborne, 53) while being characterized by a “dialectic of the aesthetic and conceptual” (Osborne, 109).

  25. (Steyerl)

  26. (Stewart Home), (Taylor)

  27. (Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik), English as (Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music)

  28. Examples include the critical writings of Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Klaus Hübler and Konrad Boehmer.

  29. Johannes Kreidler, Fremdarbeit, for musical ensemble, sampler and moderator, 2009

  30. “Autonome Musik […] antwortet in zeitloser Unschuld und Intensität auf eine ihr fremde Realität, diese an die Utopie unserer Menschlichkeit erinnernd”, (Lachenmann, 4)

  31. (Osborne, 211)

  32. Arguably, Jeff Koons’ early work still ticks all six of Osborne boxes whereras his contemporary work lost two of them, conceptuality and “anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials”.

  33. (Block)

  34. (Lippard)

  35. As manifested through continental European structuralism and Anglo-American analytic philosophy.

  36. (Maciunas)

  37. Ibid.

  38. (Heidenreich)

  39. Ibid.

  40. (Hui and Broeckmann)

  41. Initiated, among others, by Bert Papenfuß, Wolfgang Müller, Carsten and Olaf Nicolai.

  42. (Adema and Hall).

  43. reprinted in (Sohm), n.p.

  44. Ibid.