On the New. Experience of Cultural Economy

How to create a work of art that will have cultural value in the postmodern era? This question is addressed in his revolutionary work «On the New» by art historian and philosopher Boris Groys. Using Duchamp's readymade as an example,... the author explores «cultural economy»: the exchange that occurs between the archive of cultural values and the profane space outside of this archive. He asserts that innovation is an act of negative following of tradition. Groys starts from a very broad definition of economy as the exchange of values and believes that the creation of new works of art is a dialectical act of interrupting/holding a certain historical form of production and exchange. Negative following of tradition translates the ordinary from the plane of everyday life into a cultural context, thereby changing the disposition of the old and the new.