The Artist-Function and Posthumous Art History

Jones discusses the artist-function and posthumous art history. Most art history is about dead artists. This is a statistical reality, but occasionally it forms the theme of art itself, as when the photographer Hippolyte Bayard constructed a documentation of himself in 1840 as already dead. The posthumous reputation of the artist needs care and tending in its relationship to the market. An appropriate caretaker is not an undertaker embalming the corpus along with the corpse. Rather, the sensitive executor is like a gardener, familiar with art’s ecology, tending the work that remains, balancing the compost of images, discourse, and materials that generate the capacity for new readings with exhibitions, careful collection placements, and even an openness to contemporary artistic appropriations that keep the original art alive. What is certain is that the artist-function must be deftly handled, balancing production between conception and delegation, between outsourced labor and its arrogation by an author/artist, between market supply and collector demand—in the end, balancing desire and satiety within the murmuring crowd. We all participate in the artist-function.