Junkets: Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard (ca 1815); Damien Hirst
(return to Part III)
When we use the word "art" in its modern sense, we are speaking back and forth through time. We mean the inherited traditions of European aristocracy, but we also mean other traditions from around the world that French King's would have dismissed as savagery, as well as all the things we do today that no savage or French King would have hoped to have understood as art. But because so much of what we have in mind when we conjure "art" to mind are things that belong to the past it is easy to forget how alien a territory we are crossing when we enter that state of mind. an important element of the contemporary art-game is to ignore that the past is the most exotic of all foreign countries, and that even our immediate past is a place we can no longer call home.
