MOMA COMA PERFORMANCE

On the opening day and Saturday of the fair, experience the performer Thomas Sterna, who carries on his shoulders the word MOMA ( short for: MUSEUM OF MODERN ART) – a writing made of ice. With that, he steps in front of the audience and gives a short lecture about the most powerful museum in the world,
its history and its most important protagonists, etc. While he speaks, the drops of the slowly melting word fall on him, without him noticing.

Explanation:

It is one of the contradictions of the modern artist’s self-perception that even the most revolutionary protagonists dream, at the latest in the second half of their lives, of ending up in the permanent collection of MOMA or another comparable international museum. The anti-bourgeois, artistic habitus that can often be observed in young years stands in a strange contrast to this. At the same time, this is another example of how artists without this international esteem have trouble being recognized as artists in the long run.

Thus, art is that which the most important international museums of art recognize as art. Assuming that, at the latest after the triumph of the ready-made, it is very difficult nowadays to name binding criteria for the evaluation of art. One has to state that it is the museums and their officials who write art history in the long run.

The origin of the Museum of Modern Art from courtly cabinet of curiosities traditions and the inherited feudal traits of the institutions are also forgotten. The question is to what extent the much praised autonomy of modern artists is now being displaced by old (new) courtly patterns of action.