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Tom Van de Voorde
You don’t have to make much of an effort to imagine a total reset of art history. A major disaster that causes all artefacts of beauty and knowledge to disappear. A virus that turns all canvas and paper to dust and makes all the gigabytes crash. A new iconoclasm. A war that brings about a genocide of our artistic civilisa tion. A regime that sends all art up in flames, like the burning of the library of Alexandria all over again. Art, as we know it, dies as a phenomenon and becomes as vague a concept as god. Language and the world no longer know words such as artist,
museum, painting, installation and masterpiece. The gene that houses creative talent channels future Man into creating amusement and entertainment. The beautiful proves to be a physical formula, primarily used to relax and pleasure the human race. You can experience it with your ‘sixth sense’, a discovery of the third millennium. Apart from a couple of anthro pologists, the world has long forgotten that that formula once served to acquire money or prestige, to gain depth or meaning. And then this happens : In the year 4522, some where between the Urals and the North Sea, a group of construction workers digs up a pile of artefacts : a metal ladder, a stack of copper tiles, a cupboard with traces of butter and beeswax. Will anyone under stand why the names Marina Abramovic, Carl Andre and Joseph Beuys are etched into them ? Will they understand that these are the prize pieces from the S.M.A.K. ’s collection ? However genuinely lovely, interesting or fascinating we might find such objects, will anyone in the fifth millennium grasp the idea that this was once ‘art’, always assuming the word still exists ? Maybe not.
Kapstok [Hat Stand], 1981 Eik, lood / Oak, lead, 158 x 6 x 8 cm Collectie / Collection Lieve De Tollenaere
Meubels voor een vogel in Kalken [Sketch for Furniture for a Bird, Kalken], 1985 Krijt en potlood op papier / Chalk and pencil on paper, 34 x 25,5 cm Privécollectie / Private collection
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF BEAUTY AND UTILITY Raphaël Buedts and the Museum of the Future