Bazon Brock & Heinz Bude: Art as the Other of Culture

Those who demand artistic freedom count on the exemption of art from political, economic, religious and moral demands. As the other of culture, modern art is not to obey directives from outside, but only the obligation to itself. This liberation from the corset of society has long been celebrated as an achievement. Recently, however, it has been viewed increasingly critically. An art that revolves only around itself is to be countered by an art that tests itself with its means in the mode of culture and thereby aims at re-entering society. But what is the authority of an art that thus evaporates into the social?

Bazon Brock, born in 1936 in Stolp, is professor emeritus of aesthetics and cultural mediation at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. He also held professorships at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (1965-1976) and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (1977-1980). From 1968 to 1992, the "thinker on duty" and "artist without a work" conducted the documenta visitor schools he founded in Kassel. In 2017 he received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art 1st Class.