By the 1980s art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker were going further, to examine the language of art history with its gender-loaded terms such as ‘old master’ and ‘masterpiece’. They questioned the central place of the female nude in the western canon, asking why men and women are represented so differently. In his 1972 book Ways of Seeing the Marxist critic John Berger had concluded ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’. In other words Western art replicates the unequal relationships already embedded in society.

Linda Nochlin also brought attention to the category of ‘artistic greatness’ itself, arguing that such a concept was imbued with masculine bias which thereby excluded women by definition. Implicit in such terminology is the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, the former identified with painting, sculpture and architecture, the latter with the decorative arts, such as ceramics and textiles. The association of women with fields traditionally omitted from the high-art canon further demarcated the categories of masculine ‘culture’ and female ‘craft’.

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Here you have to differentiate: There is “art for everybody,” and there is art for a very exclusive group. That is where the prices explode. It has nothing to do with the pictures; those stay the same. But it has to do with the fact that some people have too much money and art belongs to the luxury goods market.

In the meantime, an extreme situation has taken over the art market. On the one hand, artists like Damien Hirst can attain the highest prices while, on the other hand, just one to three percent of graduates from art academies can afford to live from their art. It is these polar opposites that the exhibition is trying to showcase.

You could theoretically take yourself off the market, but then you wouldn’t know where the rent will come from next week. To do that, you would have to have additional sources of income. The art historian Wolfgang Ullrich came up with the term “Siegerkunst,” or “victor’s art,” which says that in order to be successful today, art needs to fulfill certain criteria: It must be international, global, easily understood, and available in a large quantity. And when someone creates art that doesn’t meet those standards, which is, for example, too flighty or difficult to retain, then it is avoided automatically.

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Art influences society by changing opinions, instilling values and translating experiences across space and time. Research has shown art affects the fundamental sense of self. Painting, sculpture, music, literature and the other arts are often considered to be the repository of a society’s collective memory. Art preserves what fact-based historical records cannot: how it felt to exist in a particular place at a particular time. Art in this sense is communication; it allows people from different cultures and different times to communicate with each other via images, sounds and stories. Art is often a vehicle for social change. It can give voice to the politically or socially disenfranchised. A song, film or novel can rouse emotions in those who encounter it, inspiring them to rally for change.

Researchers have long been interested in the relationship between art and the human brain. For example, in 2013, researchers from Newcastle University found that viewing contemporary visual art had positive effects on the personal lives of nursing home-bound elders. Art also has utilitarian influences on society. There is a demonstrable, positive correlation between schoolchildren’s grades in math and literacy, and their involvement with drama or music activities.

Yes, art can change the world, but not in the way the modernist avant-garde hoped for. The avant-garde could change the actual situation because back then people hadn’t yet become zombies — they weren’t slaves to the media and to TV; people went to concerts, they listened to music. Now art is the last territory of freedom: if a person’s soul is alive they’ll come to an exhibition and they’ll feel something. But art is increasingly marginal: it can change the situation in a country only in the sense that it remains a little island for people who think and feel.

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In 1997, the German artist Christoph Schlingensief pulled off one such work when he organized Tötet Helmut Kohl! (Kill Helmut Kohl!), for which he gathered as many unemployed people as possible to swim in then-German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s favorite holiday destination, the Austrian Wolfgangsee, while the politician was on holiday. He claimed that all of Germany’s unemployed would together displace the lake’s water. In 2014, Lawrence Abu Hamdan made the work The All-Hearing, for which he asked two sheikhs in Cairo not to deliver their usual weekly Friday sermons, but instead to deliver city-wide speeches about the dangers of noise pollution as a public health issue. Schlingensief and Abu Hamdan alike disrupted a status quo to force a change. 

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