BURGHARD

13 and its effect on art production, can be assessed against this background. This economic impact is also discernible in art and science education as well as in the ascendancy of institu- tional and commercial intermediaries. In my opinion, however, this does not suffice to draw a direct - and at the same time morally-judging – connection between the current art work boom and the demands of a booming art market. This would be just as fruitless as ascribing an exclu- sively conservative/affirmative impulse to the return of the art object compared to conceptual art practices. This does not, however, mean that a majority of art works produced over the past years weren’t conceived - in a relatively conscious manner - with a view to their commercial relevance for the market. These works are quite literally ‘art goods’ or ‘commodities’ (In this case, the status of the artwork would be, so to say, a conceptu- ally deployed mode of representation for goods production.) In other words, goods whose production is entirely focused on the aesthetic field but whose inherent codes are subordinated to commercial exploitation. At the same time, this case shows just how extensively the function of conceptuality has become aligned with a tradi- tional understanding of art (object) production within a frame- work of changing institutional conditions. Thus, the critical ca- pacity initially ascribed to it has been downgraded to a more realistic level. The Facilitators But to return to the initial question: What can be done when encountering works as part of an art project using relatively diverse formats, configurations and modes of representation? Works that may partially have that one-of-a-kind, unique char- acter of the traditional sense of art, but whose styles may also be adapted a given situation. These may have, for example, in- stitutionally or commercially-guided contexts (i.e. museum or gallery spaces). Or works that are straightforward and openly accessible. Or yet other works that are purposely left discreet and unrecognizable. So just how are they encountered in the alleged/actual neutrality of a public space? Indeed, an artistic project such as the one that burghard advances (as part of the living and working community of Romy and Stef Richter) confronts us with any number of interfaces 1 At least this applies to the American and Western European perspective, which dominates the international art discourse to this day. The simultaneous rise of conceptual practices in countries of Eastern Europe as well as in Central and South America, however, suggest similar aesthetic developments. 2 Diedrich Diedrichsen recently came out in support of a revision of this term in chapter ‘Gegen- stand, Produktion, Zusammenhang’ of his book Eigenblutdoping. Selbstverwertung, Künstlerro- mantik, Partizipation, Cologne 2008 (cf. p. 193-212) ein.

BURGHARD

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