TK: Whether it's those tapes, or the ones produced by the American army arriving on the beach in Mogadishu or depicting the President holding a press conference, they represent and exemplify  an increasingly important dimension of political image-making. It's sort of what we’re doing here, right? The event takes place in order to be photographed and reproduced and rebroadcast, transmitted and distributed, copied and viewed.

Excitement is building, with no formal press release, no art jargon, no market glamour, no hierarchy. HomeShop in Beijing, Small Productions in Hangzhou, and the Observers Association in Guangzhou are all self-sufficient, independent, conceptually ambitious, low-budget, and flexible. They are immune to the commercial uncertainty of the art system and empowered by new artistic visions and achievements.

There is no denying that the ubiquitous “Euro-” prefix that faithfully continues to promote Europe hardly designates a luxury brand. The enormous economic achievements of the single European currency notwithstanding, it would be difficult to claim that the Euro banknotes, with their drawings of fictitious historical buildings, make a fantastic contribution to contemporary art and design. And probably not too many people appreciate the sobering monument installed in the Luxembourg town of Remerschen to commemorate the 1985 Treaty of Schengen. These are just a few examples; in fact, quite a substantial share of European identity breathes boredom and cheapness, and this situation is not to be attributed to any form of central control or branding, but rather to the simultaneous deployment of market liberalism, good intentions, and managerial protocol.

It reminds us that before a post-conceptual art of the 1990s was formalized and marketed as Relational Aesthetics, there was an earlier push to situate artistic practice within the political that was less a means of safeguarding art’s autonomy than an aggressive assertion of the indivisibility of representation and action (or activism, for that matter).

The single most interesting discussion I have had about art was not with an artist, curator, critic, or the like, but with an El Al security officer a few years ago when I was detained and subsequently escorted onto a flight to Tel Aviv. I really messed up when I mentioned that I never intended to be an artist. As it turned out, the interrogator was himself an artist, or, more precisely, a cartoonist.