On the New. The Experience of the Economy of Culture

How to create a work of art that will have cultural value in the era of postmodernism? This question is answered in his revolutionary work «On the New» by art historian and philosopher Boris Groys. Using the example of Duchamp's ready-made, the author examines the «cultural economy»: the exchange that takes place between the archive of cultural values and the profane space outside this archive. He argues that innovation is an act of negative following of tradition. Groys starts from an extremely 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/retaining a particular historical form of production and exchange. Negative following of tradition translates the ordinary from the plane of everyday life into a cultural context, thus changing the disposition of the old and the new.