Here is a link to the article from NYTimes Magazine discussed below.
Here is a link to the referenced artist's gallery page.
While making my way through Arthur Lubow's expositional article on the art of Tino Sehgal, engaged by the subject, I was thrown off by these thoughts:
“Is this art?” Almost a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp aced that one by attaching titles to everyday objects (a urinal, a bicycle wheel) and demonstrating that anything can be art if the artist says it is. Nevertheless, the ineffaceable critical question remains: “Is it good art?”
While the author may be correct that the critical question, that is, the question of the critic, could remain: "is it good art?", that problem bears little relation to the question that begins the quote: "is it art?" Once skewering that debate with the famed Dadaist's famed readymades, it seems habitual to reorder the now unstable delineation around the issue of quality. But that issue, just as the one that is oft claimed as its originator, begs the more concrete and approachable question of authority: who or what deems this to be art, and who or what deems this person(s) to be the artist?
(Or maybe instead of saying that the question of quality is not related to the question of being, I should say that they are the same question, or that they fire at such quick succession that each voids the need of the other.)
The more important, even urgent, factor that dogs art reception is of an awareness of power structures and perception habits that frame certain objects and activities within the definition of art and leave others foreign.
And in handling this question, the artist and subject of the article, Tino Sehgal, who presents undocumented and ephemeral human performances in place of sculpture, seems to be trapped in a paradox:
His work seems to function best in a museum or a gallery, where its subtraction of a material object is made visible by the institutional surroundings that give shape to his void. “My work definitely needs this framing as art, and the stronger this framing is,” he says, “the more works of mine are possible.”
And:
“The museum has developed over the last two or three hundred years as a temple of objects made from the earth. I’m the guy who comes in and says: ‘I’m bored with that. I don’t think it’s that interesting, and it’s not sustainable.’ Inside this temple of objects, I refocus attention to human relations.”
While bemoaning the unsustainability of the museum, Sehgal most heavy-handedly reinforces its place as institution, its employees as taste-makers, and its objects as requisite frames to his actions. Rather than any true upheaval of history, here we have yet another attempt (albeit clever, successful, and phenomenal) by an artist to mount history's apex, to become the darling of That Which Is and Has Been. Surely Sehgal's valuable work takes on many interesting questions, but absent from those is one he professes: how to make sustainable our structures of authority.
