CIVIL SOCIETY [fr. communauté]

Civil society is based on public debate.
Artist are usually left out from this public debate.
Artist are supposed to shut up when it comes to political or social issues.
But not only are they supposed to shut up, they aren’t even asked.
It is almost as everyone has forgotten that artists do exist.
Everyone is asked of opinions on civic matter--the bicycle repairer, the striptease girl, the talk-show guest.
Not just not the artist.
Civil society and Public art are of about the same age.
They both date from the latter half of the 18th century.
This was an epoch labeled modernity.
Because of contemporary with each other, civil society and public art are not supposed to be interrelated.
When civil society, in Immanuel Kant’s words, is about “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” art became—probably as a counter-weight to this ideal civil subject—man’s submersion in this very self-imposed maturity.
Now, we have to ask ourselves, what kind of matter this self-imposed immaturity is, from which man should emerge ...
... and in which the artist should remain submerged?
Evidently it is a green matter, as it is “immature” or “unripe”.
It is matter in its raw state.
As the emergence from this matter means Enlightenment, it follows that the matter itself is shady or shadowy.
Topologically speaking it is located in the basement or the cellar of the world.
As something not visible or preferably invisible.
Logically speaking public art it is potential, whereas civil society is actual.
It follows that this matter is imperfect, unfinished, unrealized, whereas maturity is realized, finished and perfected matter.
Now, as we all know, civil society is not realized, nor finished, and definitively not perfected.
Civil society nevertheless formally behaves as if it is the perfect, finished realization of civil society.
It formally behaves as if we live in the best of all imaginable worlds—and so with necessity.