Taking Robert Smithson’s seemingly whimsical question (Why should flies be without art?) in his Yucatan-essay seriously, I will attempt to delineate a possible logic of art in our immediate future. The prediction of this hypothesis states that the scientific as well as angelic practices of John Dee in the immediate future, and for all practical purposes, will be regarded as an artistic practice (as well). The argument follows two lines of thought. The first is the causal transformation of the art historical past from a necessary to a contingent state with the recent receptions of the practices of Hilma af Klint, Korbinian Aigner, and Maria Sibylla Merian. The second line is a re-interpretation of the Early Renaissance trompe-l’oeil flies (Petrus Christus, Carlo Crivelli) in the light of Robert Smithson’s essay and in Ilya Kabakov’s flies, identifying the musca domestica as the art vector carrying this contagion. This is a highly speculative essay, of course, but on the other hand: the hypothesis can be perfectly verified or falsified if (or if not) John Dee’s practice is exhibited as art before, say, 2030. And this property of the speculation comes from a third line of thought, namely that the intelligences with which John Dee, Hilma af Klint, Robert Smithson, and Walid Raad are communicating, speak to them in a perfective aspect of the future.

The aim of this paper is to surface what to me looks like a delicate art political paradox. The paradox I perceive is this: in every liberal-capitalist society art is good (and more art is better) and thus art is eligible to public support, good art more so, but as there is no inherently bad (or evil) art, no art should be suppressed. The values of art (whichever they might be) are to be distributed through an active and engaging criticism, through art education, and communicated to permeate all of society to participate in. This cultural policy is almost a blue-print of the utopian ideas of the avantgarde, especially of the different strands of neo-avantgardism (conceptual art, performance, art activism, relational aesthetics, etc.) which all emphasizes notions of participation, emancipation, creativity, critical engagement, and co-operation. Although thus agreeing in ambition ― and this is the crucial and questionable presumption of my paradox ― this does not happen. The successful artists are (still) obviously those who perform in the art market and have retrospectives at important venues, and not any hypothetical artist producing the abovementioned goods. Furthermore it seems to me ― given the immeasurability of the quantities ― that the degree of engaging criticism, education and communication is inversely proportional to the success of any artistic practice. The implicit answer to this paradox seems univocally to be that we just have to push harder, to increase the support for the artists and to further encourage the public to take an active part in art. Instead of continuing on this path, I would like to invite you ― as a thought experiment ― to consider the art politics of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–85, including the two successive gerontics, Andropov and Chernenko). Or, to be more precise: the consequences for artistic practice of Brezhnev’s cultural policy. To do so we will consider the changes of the artistic practices following the zastoya of Brezhnev by the some of the Moscow Conceptualists (Collective Actions and AptArt), as well as some lesser known practices of the Mit’ki group and the Necrorealists in Leningrad, compared to the changes in the same artistic practices that came with the perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–91).

On the background of, on the one hand, the medieval authority of the _image_ within the pre-modern framework of "presence and likeness" (Belting) and its corresponding disregard for material traces and indices that produces the for us strange attributions of pictures to Christ or S. Lucas and, on the other hand, our modern "paradigm of the trace" (Lenain), which in abundance exhibits these traces as images (x-ray photographs, cross-section paint analysis, dendrochronological tables etc), I will discuss the question of the relation between image (_eikon_) and trace (_ichnos_) within the context of the visual arts. The hypothesis I will propose, is that any observational apparatus  -- from High Performance Liquid Chromatography, over photographic reproductions and the connoisseur's eye, to the casual museum go'er -- can't perceive both image and trace at the same time. If one is visible, the other is invisible. An observation of the image and the authority of likeness will inevitable have as an effect the invisibility of traces, which we could call the medieval "ichnoclasm" or disregard of the material support. More disturbing is that if this hypothesis is correct, we are endowed with a corresponding inability to observe _images_, which means that we are trapped within an inherent iconoclasm, in our ichnophilic desire to transilluminate the pictorial support: to look close, closer and most close up to the image. This inherent iconoclasm of us can be diagnosed in art history as a science as well as in virtually every modern artistic practice.    The argument for this general idea will (hopefully) be set forth through three cases in point. The first case being the recent (2006) 'rediscovery' of "a Rembrandt" (_The Crusader_) in the National Gallery of Denmark, which had lived a life of obscurity in the basements at the Museum after having been rejected as genuine at different points during the 20th century. This will be followed by the recent discovery of a Van Gogh in september 2013, which contains a curious and rather anachronistic piece of evidence based on likeness and remembrance. This decisive piece of evidence suggests that the image (likeness, _eikon_) still operates behind the discipline of art history and in artistic practices, but now in disguise of an index or a trace. This phenomenon I will call "an image of a second order". Finally I will argue that these visual developments in the field of art -- the discursive differentiations of the images of a second order -- are not utilized, but rather produced and driven by the practices of art forgery. How this effect of the appearance of a second order of images will be exemplified with the help of the equally recent case of Wolfgang Beltracchi. I will not be able to cover all this within the scope of the paper, but this to give an idea of the context of that which eventually will be presented.

When images look like something they do so because they are different from what they resemble. This difference is not sufficiently captured by the traditional theories of representation and mimesis, and yet it is the condition for any such theory. Various contemporary image theorists have pointed out that Plato already understood that images are not what they look like. Images have their own existence, which cannot be identified with a concept, but should be examined in terms of actions.

This book comprises fifteen articles that investigate what images do, particularly in relation to the disciplines of architecture, design and visual arts. It claims that it is the differentiating power of images—their actions—which constitutes their capacity to look like something they are not, as well as create something that does not yet exist. What Images Do address the crucial role that images might play in producing and investigating what we have not yet seen or understood in and of reality.

Den pågående revaluering af Baronessen, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven er symptomatisk nok ikke særligt motiveret af  “det tidligste readymade”, men snarere af hendes performative praksis och “allografiske strategier” rettet mod kunstværkets og kunstnerens hypertrofier. Baronessens sceneløse performativitet peger mod en helt anden kunsthistorisk vektor, og artikeln foreslår at denne vektor, når den bliver inkluderet i billedkunstens iboende “autografiske” modalitet, vil have vidtgående konsekvenser for kunstværkets status (henimod en affektiv dokumentalitet) og det “forfatterfunktion” (henimod en ambivalens med hensyn til subjekt-objekt positioner).

The emerging revaluation of The Baroness, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is surprisingly not driven by any alleged 'first readymade', but rather by her performative practices and in-real-life behaviour as "allographic strategies" against the hypertrophies of the art work and the artist. This performative mode points at altogether different art historical vector, a vector than stems from the Berlin cabaret scene and gives a partial explanation to the otherwise inexplicable recent interest in Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne project. It is suggested here that when allographic practices, together with the recent focus on performativity, are included in the context of the intrinsic "autographical" character of visual art, will have far-reaching consequences for the status of the art work (towards an affective documentality) and its "author fuction" (towards an ambiguity with regard to subject-object positions).