ABSTRACT
Art-as-Tradition lives on, has to take place, as part of a general aestheticisation in which the only stake that really matters for the technoscientific culture is to ensure the continued functioning of its apparatus for the unfinishable remodelling of the means of life. The search for difference seeks the unruly in order to undo, however temporarily, that which the culture takes for granted as representable. It is this that constitutes, in endlessly and subtly different ways, the intensity of artists' erotic attachments to and re-formings of Tradition. The quotation marks here thus have implications for the ways we might approach what is offered us in the names of Art and Tradition, their practices and their works. Managed 'Tradition', then, gives us all the signs of Art through its apparatus for making, transmitting and exchanging its knowledge-as-information-about-art. It is this that quotation marks around 'Tradition' mark. 'Tradition' appears and is put to work in and as its representation within this apparatus.
