Art

languages: ennl

The arts can help us to look at the world from a new perspective, to amaze us, to contemplate about what is important and what is of value, and how we want to interact with one another. Today this is more important than ever.

How do we find new codes of conduct, between each other and with the planet, that enable us to develop our well-being without over-exploiting scarce resources or each other upon a finite planet? The arts can help us to think freely, without purpose, with the possibility - but no guarantee – of finding new perspectives.

But in the hour of our greatest need, the arts are so weakened that they no longer seem to succeed in making powerful arguments about beauty, meaning and free thinking. No longer are the arts a mirror of society with a sense of eternity, but more a means to fill free time.

The dominant political view is that art should be functional, contribute to the economy as a business, and otherwise be mainly a hobby without obligation. However, we can now conclude that the arts have seen little benefit from the attempts of the past two decades to get artists to show more entrepreneurship or to address the responsibility of the patronage or audiences.

On the one hand, this pavilion is an attempt to gain insight into how the relationship between art and policy works; what works and what doesn't work?

On the other hand, it is an ode to art for the sake of art, with ample scope for wonder, absurdism and conceptual art as tools to loosen up seized thinking.