At the request of of Vienna-based contemporary art museum the MAK, I sent this text contribution for their their annual report, Agenda Art 2010, which deals with the subject of "the crisis of art." The museum described it as "perfect for the agenda":

For solutions to the current crisis of art we must first
realize the underlying causes. It is a matter of perspective and
posture.

Art presents itself as a critical commentary on social and
productive relations, from a perspective of exteriority. And so, when
it is increasingly impossible to say there is an inside and an outside,
then what?

As an activity within a complex economic and semiotic ecosystem, art
proudly occupies an idiosyncratic niche. What then, when all
perspectives and positions increasingly resemble niches?

Art's stance is predicated on independence and an aversion to
reciprocal complicity. And when we realize that emergence within a
field of reciprocal complicity is the source of all consciousness, all
sociality, all economics, of life itself -- then what?

It may be necessary for art to die and be reborn for it to discard
its inherited identity. It may be that a new art, in its interiority,
its pervasiveness, its complicity, is unrecognizable. It may be.