quotes from Boris Groys, "On the New"

"As I have mentioned, a new artwork should not repeat the forms of old, traditional, already museographed art. But today, to be really new a new artwork should not repeat the old differences between art objects and ordinary things. By repeating these differences, it is possible only to create a different artwork, not a new artwork. A new artwork looks really new and alive only if it resembles, in a certain sense, every other ordinary, profane thing, or every other ordinary product of popular culture. Only in such a case can the new artwork function as a signifier for the world outside the museum walls. The new can be experienced as such only if it produces an effect of out-of-bounds infinity—if it opens an infinite view on reality outside of the museum. And this effect of infinity can be produced, or rather staged, only inside the museum: in the context of reality itself we can experience the real only as finite because we ourselves are finite. The small, controllable space of the museum allows the spectator to imagine the world outside the museum's walls as splendid, infinite, ecstatic. This is, in fact, the primary function of the museum: to let us imagine what is outside the museum as infinite. New artworks function in the museum as symbolic windows, opening up a view on the infinite outside. But, of course, new artworks can fulfil this function only for a relatively short period of time before becoming no longer new but merely different, their distance to ordinary things having become, with time, all too obvious. The need then emerges to replace the old new with the new new, in order to restore the romantic feeling of the infinite real.

The museum is, in this respect, not so much the space for the representation of art history as a machine to produce and stage the new art of today—in other words, to produce "today" as such. In this sense the museum produces, for the first time, the effect of presence, of looking alive. Life looks really alive only if we see it from the perspective of the museum because, as I said, only in the museum are we able to produce new differences—differences beyond differences—differences which are emerging here and now. This possibility of producing new differences does not exist in reality itself, because in reality we meet only old differences—differences that we recognize. To produce new differences we need the space of culturally recognised and codified "non-reality". The difference between life and death is, in fact, of the same order as that between God and the ordinary human being, or between artwork and mere thing—it is a difference beyond difference, which can only be experienced, as I have said, in the museum or archive as a socially recognised space of "non-real". Again, life today looks alive only when seen from the perspective of the archive, museum, library. In reality itself we are confronted only with dead differences—like the difference between a new and an old car."