Paul Chan, What Art Is and Where it Belongs

http://e-flux.com/journal/view/95

Here's an article by Paul Chan from the Museum of Contemporary art in Barcelona. He ends on a note we recognize: "The irony is that because it cannot express what it truly wants to be, art becomes something greater and more profound. Its full measure reaches beyond its own composition, touching but never embracing the family of things that art ought to belong to, but does not, because it refuses (or is unable) to become a thing-in-itself. Instead, art takes on a ghostly presence that hovers between appearance and reality. This is what makes art more than a thing."

Nell