Czy kolekcja sztuki musi być artystyczna?

Abstract

The paper comprises short reflections on the situation of art collections in the modern reality. While the work of art has always been present in collection, the collection itself, as a specific form is a historic phenomenon closely bound with the early modern idea of art as an autonomic symbolic sphere referring to intellectual and spiritual values. This is where the paradigm of such collection comes from – the collection as an assembly of men-made artefacts of a special masterpiece status, attributed to them due to their originality, uniqueness and virtuosity (in a sense of personal making) determined by the artist’s talent. Since the early 20th century, and especially in the years 1950–1980, a significant part of art openly rejected that paradigm through works, that were neither original, unique nor masterly, and finally, by rejecting their material aspect in favour of the creative act or action. In effect the traditional art collection could no longer meet its needs. The works of modern art often as such can not pretend to the special status of the masterpiece. The creative act or artistic situation entirely escape the collector, leaving him/her with nothing but props, accessories and leftovers, or with data carriers with recorded work – such as film tape, video cassette, compact disc or carriers of the memory of the creative act and testimonies about it, as a visual documentation, legal acts, instructions, certificates, reports and affidavits, and in extreme cases – just the viewer’s memory. This should however not be perceived as the end, the death of traditional art collection, which has been proved by the reality (the flourish of museums and private collections). However it is true, that it has lost the monopole, the exclusiveness of the model of art collecting, that now has to coexists with other modes. If in past it was an amateurs’ collection or a gallery exhibiting masterpieces (original, unique and of personal making), today next to them appears what usually did not or has not been granted the artistic character: an archive, a library, a property-room, storage-room or even a scrap-heap, or a film- or record library, database and finally the Internet, as an entirely separate reality, seemingly non-collection- like at all. In the face of increasing phenomenon of the art melting into the aesthetics of commonplaceness, what fills them is more the testimony of spiritual and visual culture then the masterpiece and is being collected for documentary rather then purely aesthetic purpose.