To ask whether art is useful or useless is already to concede too much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is to assume that use remains the structuring condition within which art must situate itself.

                                          That it must either serve, resist, withdraw, or refuse. That it must, in some form, account for its presence.

 

 

 

 

But this assumption no longer holds with the same force.

 

 

The distinction between the useful and the useless presumes a field in which such terms retain coherence—where works can be positioned, read, and evaluated along a shared axis of purpose.

 

 

 

 

It presumes, in other words, a common horizon

within which art’s relation to the social, the political, or the economic can still be negotiated.