NEW ENERGIES – HOW MUCH SOCIETY CAN ART TOLERATE?

A retrospective on the E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks at ART Düsseldorf.

Art fairs are places of encounter. They bring galleries, artists, collectors, and institutions together. At the same time, they are places where the questions of our time come into sharp focus. With the E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks, ART Düsseldorf became a platform for exchange, perspectives, and social dialogue for three days.

Under the title New Energies, the programme was dedicated to topics that move art and society alike: the social responsibility of art and culture, Europe as a shared cultural space of experience, and the challenges of transformation and sustainability within the art system.

The three contributions below take up these conversations — not as minutes, but as approaches. They carry forward the central ideas of the discussions and make visible what impulses emerged from the conversations.

The programme was made possible by the E.ON Foundation. Talks and thematically curated Art Walks directly connected social questions with the artistic positions presented at the fair and made dialogue tangible right in front of the works.

Because an art fair is more than a marketplace. It is a place where ideas are born, positions meet, and new perspectives are opened. The E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks see themselves as a contribution to this dialogue — beyond the days of the fair as well.

The Friday of the E.ON Talks asked what art is supposed to be for. The most convincing answer was not an answer, but an act of endurance.

There is a sentence spoken early on this Friday that sets the tone for everything that follows: that exhibition texts are sometimes written not because there is something new to say, but because an exhibition must justify itself. With a historical figure like Caspar David Friedrich, so the objection from the first round goes, mediation sometimes arises as a legitimisation of museum practice — not from research, but from the need to assert one’s own relevance. That is an uncomfortable opening for a day that runs under the heading “New Energies for Art.” Because the question embedded in it runs through all three rounds: must art explain itself, must it be useful, must it do something — or may it simply stand on its own?

Ann-Katrin Günzel, editor-in-chief of Kunstforum International, articulated the criterion by which criticism is decided for her with admirable clarity. A work, she said in essence, should not be completely replaceable — not by a text, not by a film. Where description fully catches up with the work, the work loses its power. Annkathrin Kohout countered this with the reality of the attention economy: art on social media never appears alone, but always in the feed, between advertising images and political images, structurally deprived of the contemplative moment. And yet this first round did not end in cultural pessimism. Jennifer Braun, alias Gen Z Art Critic, embodies a form of reception that does not merely suffer the algorithm, but works against it. The deliberate search for the longer, the more complex — the video essay instead of the hot take. Mediation is not in crisis. It is finding itself new bodies.

The second round shifted the question from viewing to acting. Stephan Muschick of the E.ON Foundation described art as a medium that can address complex questions — climate change, integration — more compellingly than any analytical format. Kathrin Jentjens of the Neuen Auftraggeber countered with a model that reverses the direction: projects are not born from institutional directives, but from the concerns of citizens who come together. A school garden in Mönchengladbach, simultaneously a public space, served as evidence that participation from below sustains what participation from above would shatter. Gil Bronner, who with the Philara Collection in Flingern deliberately seeks dialogue with the neighbourhood, added the necessary humility: one must take people seriously. The sentence sounds harmless and is not. It names the fault line at which engaged art regularly fails — where it speaks about a place instead of with it.

The sharpest exchanges came in the final round, which negotiated the place itself. Stefanie Reichart of Manifesta 16 in the Ruhr region spoke of empty churches as exhibition spaces — buildings she does not conceive of as museums, but as “beaches”: places where people across social classes can meet, in spaces where other social spaces have long since disappeared. “This is not a church” is the motto that frames the repurposing as social transformation. Marcel Schumacher of Kunsthaus NRW offered a remarkable counter-doubt: he was not at all certain whether it was right to burden art with the task of bringing people together. The museum, he insisted, must also remain a place where one can be alone with art. Linda Conze of Kunstpalast put it in the day’s most concise formulation: art stands primarily for itself.

Between Reichert’s beaches and Conze’s autonomy lies the real tension of Friday — and it becomes even sharper when measured against a voice from the following day. The curator Markus Ambach was to speak on Saturday of art as an “agitator,” as an active element within social structures. Between “agitator” and “stands for itself” no compromise seems possible. Either art intervenes, or it refuses purpose. Either it is a tool, or it is free.

Yet this very alternative turned out, in the end, to be falsely posed. The most convincing thought of the day was not the choice of one side, but the insight that a place can be both at once. A museum can offer space for a solitary, concentrated engagement with a single work — and in the next room, at the same time, reach out to a neighbourhood through a workshop. The two functions need not come into conflict. They simply must not be dissolved into each other. Mediation, it was said, may be independent and need not always correlate with the current exhibition; it can serve as its own offering to open up the space without instrumentalising art.

That is more uncomfortable than it sounds, because it disappoints the longing for a clear position. Those who want art to save the world will find no satisfaction here, nor will those who wish to protect it from all demands. The more productive position requires tolerating the contradiction: art stands for itself and it has effects. It is useless in the emphatic sense — that is, not reducible to a purpose — and for precisely that reason of a value that no purpose can replace.

The “new energy” that the day’s title asked after is then not to be found in yet another label hung around the neck of art. It lies in the willingness of institutions to remain open: physically, to the neighbourhood and to the stranger, and intellectually, to the possibility that two contradictory things can be true at the same time. It is not art that must bend itself to suffice. The spaces around it must become wide enough to bear it in all its contradictions.