Securities of art v. Commons of art. On the conflict between authentication and collectivization in times of crisis 1870-2020

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tobias Vogt
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 514731806

The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence have intensified two opposing tendencies in the visual arts and beyond: on the one hand, the drive to secure identities and information through authorization and authentication processes, and on the other, the transformation of intellectual property into an increasingly authorless and fluid public domain. This research project examines this conflict between identifying authentication and disidentifying collectivization from an art historical and theoretical perspective for the first time. Following the three-year initial phase of the project, the second phase examines the countertendency to artistically designed authentication from 1870 to the present day. This analysis unfolds methodically on three levels: procedural, programmatic, and auctorial. On the procedural level, this tendency is characterized by the recontextualization of other artists’ material and the free dissemination of one’s own, as manifested, for example, in collages and readymades, détournement and appropriation, remix and quotation culture. These practices will be typologically organized and made structurally intelligible with the help of Gérard Genette’s concept of transtextuality. On the programmatic level, the focus is on notions and legal forms of common ownership (public property, Creative Commons, the anti-copyright movement, etc.) that artists have established as parergonal interpretive frameworks for their practices of appropriating and disseminating artistic material. At the auctorial level, the countertendency to authentication concerns non-individual, collaborative, and collective models of authorship. Here, research into quasi-corporate initiatives that maintain an ambivalent relationship to the economy through their names – Société Anonyme, Merz, General Idea, Claire Fontaine – represents a further desideratum. The second phase of the project thus aims to consider the history of artistic authentication, which was already fruitfully studied in the initial phase, in conjunction with the theories and practices that seek to liberate, or even unleash artistic materials, concepts, and models of authorship. Again, taking economic upheavals as a starting point, the focus is on crises and transformations that, while being historically concentrated in the period between 1870 and 2020, have broader social ramifications. The aim of the project is to demonstrate the hitherto largely unexplored productive conflict between the desire for secure authentication and the hope for a diversified culture of barrier-free and universally accessible information in the visual arts. The central thesis proposes a close causal connection between the conceptual appropriation of artistic materials and practices on the one hand, and of names and strategies from the business world on the other.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants