ABSTRACT
THE ARTIST HANS HAACKE ACHIEVED A qualified martyrdom in an era generally supposed to have been one of total artistic permissiveness, at the hands of an institution hardly calculated to confer such status on an avant-garde artist seeking to press back the limits of art. Those inauspicious circumstances notwithstanding, an exhibition of Haacke's work was canceled, on the grounds of artistic impropriety, six weeks before it was to have opened, in 1971, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It was annulled by Thomas Messer, then as now director of the Guggenheim, who also discharged the curator, Edward Fry, for persisting in championing an art indexed as unsuitable. The work that chiefly offended was devoted to the activities, over a twenty-year period, of a rapacious real estate operation in New York, and its repression demonstrates that even then, in 1971, real estate had replaced sex as the locus of dark practices and charged fantasy. Anything in the sexual line could be treated with artistic impunity (except perhaps as an advertisement in an art magazine), but it is a tribute to the precociousness of art that a desecration was perceived before it was recognized that housing had become sacred. Haackehad found his way to the heart of the future, and Messer intuited that the heart must be shielded. It hardly matters that the controversy was deflected onto the plane of aesthetics. Messer, who would have represented himself as defending the purity of art, was in reality defending the sanctity of an industry that was soon to transform the imagination in ways undreamt of by art. Haacke, who consistently represents himself as bringing to consciousness the fact that art had become commodified, failed to see that art and real estate had begun to replace one another in the general scheme. Artworks indeed have sunk to the level of commodities. Investing in art futures has become the truth of the 1980s. It is real estate that has taken the place art once knew.
