Abstract

The image and imagining of culture are highly dependent on what we perceive, choose and institutionalize as art, as one of the building bricks in culture’s conception. As approved commodity with literally transcendent powers, art, thus incomparable and beyond any other kind of good, succeeded in serving an entire, increasingly globalized art world. Negotiating the absent, in this regard, is the wish for and the enactment of a system of transfiguration beyond the trivial of the good, encountering the “tracing” of creation. In this context, mechanisms of institutionalization within the structures of the art industry, as we are facing it nowadays, are the essential vehicle of these negotiations. Hence, in the present essay, that system and its structures of enforcement of artistic positions and discourse shall be denominated in order to comprehend the status of shock as subject and artistic as well as societal form which equally has found entrance to the negotiations of common “consecration” within the by now global “Kunstbetrieb.”