If the museum of modern art served certain universal paradigms, a master narrative, and the hegemonic goals of the big Western institutions, then the museum of contemporary art must serve the needs of local spaces so that they can enter as equals into dialogues with other spaces. In order for conditions to be at all possible for designing a museum of contemporary art as I describe it here, local spaces must determine their own work priorities, which cannot be universal.

As Genosse means “comrade,” to be con-temporary—zeitgenössisch—can thus be understood as being a “comrade of time”—as collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties. And under the conditions of our contemporary product-oriented civilization, time does indeed have problems when it is perceived as being unproductive, wasted, meaningless. Such unproductive time is excluded from historical narratives, endangered by the prospect of complete erasure. This is precisely the moment when time-based art can help time, to collaborate, become a comrade of time—because time-based art is, in fact, art-based time.

Innovative concepts will still be met today with rejection and ignorance, or a mixture of both. But usually the information is too ready available and there are too many players for things not to find an audience: even the most outrageous or unthinkable things will readily be accepted even if only by a relatively small group; and in this sense, rage and rejection have often been replaced by a kind of generalized indifference. But should that indifference be held against art? Should art try to violently break through indifference by again provoking rage and rejection?

In this case, “I” am not the author of the novel, but rather, reality writes its own novel by my hand. This reality then grows increasingly surrealistic and begins to overflow, becoming saturated to a point where it is emptied of its own value.

Art museums operate by renting out exhibition spaces and filling programs with paying shows, completely lacking in curatorial framework or presentation. Art centers accept shows supported by gallery money or the investment of private art dealers and so-called collectors (who are actually speculators). Art archives and triennials are initiated, funded, and curated by private gallerists who seek to feature their own represented artists in a broader and apparently more authoritative context. Art historians compile bulky histories of contemporary art heavily informed and influenced by their closed circle of contacts.

I have long liked the fatalist sound of this “had-to-put-it-in” in particular: it speaks to a basic reluctance on the part of philosophy to accept that only one thing is more important (“higher”) than philosophy, namely, art—the grudging acknowledgement (and this grudge may well be the source of all critique) that art, as a very precisely delineated philosophical concept that is absolutely distinct from the general notion of culture, is simply the most important thing, namely, that on which all other thinking (including that of “culture”) hinges.