One criteria of the Fine Arts Department is to support non-commercial art.

Martin Krenn: Grant Kester

Krenn: Yes, I understand that, and there are two things that I would like to add. First, I am from a slightly different cultural background because I am in a country where the society as well as the art system still supports conceptual art practices. In the regulations for public support for fine arts one criterion is to promote art projects that would have difficulties to be successful in the art market Nevertheless, it is very difficult to survive as an artist. And there is also this tendency towards privatisation and commercialisation of art in Austria. So I would differentiate, although everything is interrelated, between the pure art market and the art system that is mainly financed by public funds: ranges from museums and galleries that are run by art associations to public art universities. In German there is the word Kunstbetrieb that is often used for this part of the art system. There is no direct translation for it but it stands for a kind of art system that is not mainly dominated by the art market. So, I think it is important to point out that there are main differences between a public art institution and a commercial gallery and that they have to have different objectives. I am in the privileged situation that I am represented by a private gallery (Gallery Zimmermann Kratochwill) that supports my conceptual art practice because they just believe in its artistic as well as political value and they also run a gallery in Manila that explicitly supports socially engaged artists there, but as far as I know this is rather an exception in the commercial art world. And the second thing that I think, which is really important, is to criticize a simplified notion of ‘revolutionary art’, of a political art without any dialogical component in it, as you analyse it in your texts. This is often no more than a symbolic gesture. I think it would really be important to develop a language to describe that other type of politically engaged art, as you said before.