not

An elite group of no more than 10-20 collectors have begun over the past 3-4 years to visit art fairs abroad, acquire works by international artists and attempt to position their collection beyond national borders.
Especially in recent years, as the real estate and the stock exchange boom had stopped, many turned to contemporary art for short-term or long-term investment. Quite a few of these buyers prefer direct contact to artists, making bulk purchases at heavy discounts in the studio. Aware of the risks of siding with contemporary art, they diversify their selections, and acquire groups of works that are difficult to bring on common denominator within a harmonious collection, yet guarantee a balanced future. [..] Strictly speaking these acquisitions make up no collections (if the latter is understood as a coherent entity), yet may become one by slimming down.
Lawyers and brokers, media figures and top managers seem to share a strong penchant for getting to know the person whose works they collect and for establishing a contact they often deem “friendly”. In my experience the artists share this “friendship” less enthusiastically, yet play the role happily for obvious reasons. [..] [Collectors] build up a network of artist acquaintances parallel to their private and business relations, and often spend increasing amounts of time in this new niche of their life. Collecting in this role is a medicine for the thirst of new human relations, often (seemingly) less rational than the world of business, and less conventional than the family circle. Without stretching the point, one may say that quite a few actors of the scene collect friends rather than art.
In the Western world normally unthinkable due to excessive prices, several Hungarian collectors have been able over the past two decades to amass Hungarian works spanning the whole of the 20th century.
In terms of media, painting predominates. Other traditional forms (graphics, sculpture) are much less popular, but their position is improving. Photography, new media, installation, object art, other ephemeral, site-specific, and mixed media works are still lagging behind, but likewise spreading. In recent years, the elite layer of collectors has definitely realised the importance of diversifying the media they collect.
The influence of galleries on collectors is also on the rise. In the first phase following the fall of the Wall, collectors were – for reasons lying at hand – very individualistic, often secretive in their approach, as well as financially stronger and faster than the young galleries. Most collectors were unwilling to pay a “gallery price”, and we can still find artists and buyers negotiating in a double prices system (where atelier prices grossly undercut the gallery price level), yet this is now receding.
Some collections tell immediately, at first look the decisive impact of the gallery standing behind them, while in other cases the collector retains the right of selection stronger, yet accepts the dictate of the market: purchases have to be carried out increasingly by way of a gallery. This motivates more and more artists to ally with galleries, which, in turn, forces a growing circle of collectors to frequent the galleries and art dealers. The system of collecting becomes more and more institutional in Hungary.
The sales made at the fair could just as well take place in the galleries at some other time; the fair exerts no clearly identifiable impact on collecting. International fairs, in contrast, have a rapidly growing effect on the Hungarian scene.
A surprisingly large number of new galleries (launched since 2000) have been quite successful in building up their clientele, and luring away buyers from senior galleries. Non-profit galleries have an increasingly important say in the game. As collectors become experienced, they realise that curators working at these institutions, and artists exhibiting there, often have prophetic power. What appears as a peripheral new phenomenon in the arts scene, perhaps in one of the non-profit “gate-keeper galleries”, may within a year or two have ascended to higher status.
Among the museums, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest takes a central position, yet its co-operation with collectors is brand new and still fairly weak, rather symbolic. Both the previous (founding) and the current director can be judged as mistrustful of private engagement in art, although in the past year or two there have been gestures of familiarising between the museum administration and private collectors. [..] Neither the Hungarian National Gallery nor the Municipal Gallery (the two other important public collections of modern and contemporary art in the capital) can boast closer ties with collectors. To put it bluntly, most collectors do not even know that both of these museums have a permanent exhibition of post-World War II art, and that their collections include some seminal works. In return, most curators and chief administrators working at these (and other) museums in Hungary are prone to similar ignorance.
Art magazines seldom provide food for thought to private collectors.
Although many [collectors] increasingly fear the “three evils” of publicity – the tax office, burglary and public envy – there is still regular coverage of art collecting by a few specialised art writers.
With a few exceptions (such as the Kassák Museum), larger public institutions rarely show private collections. For the Ludwig Museum, showing a private collection is entirely out of question. True, the international scope of this museum’s own collection has no peer among the private holdings in the country (with the sole exception of the Somlói–Spengler Collection, which attempts to catch up with international trends of collecting).
Over one hundred private collections of contemporary art in Hungary.
Collectors increasingly get to know each other. Recently a communication agency has set up a platform for their regular meetings, as well as a webs-site for interaction, while a few collectors go further and jointly fund art prizes, visits abroad and, vice versa, invitations of international art experts to Hungary.
Among the company collections, that of Raiffeisen Bank is the most solid, while among he company-funded prizes Strabag Award dominated the scene for over a decade, with the brand new Aviva Prize now poised for taking it over. In most corporate projects, however, the domination of the marketing aims can not be overlooked.
As elsewhere in the world, artists themselves are avid collectors in Hungary. Some of these collections (e.g. that of László Fehér, Tamás Konok, István Haraszty, Ákos Matzon) have become known through numerous exhibitions, yet there are dozens more. Most artists build their holdings by way of exchange, and this opens the way to international works, too, that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. A few artists (for instance Imre Bak) became known for that as early as in the 1970s, with museums borrowing foreign works from them; and it still holds that artist collectors are at the forefront of international collecting in the country.
Spurred by Dóra Maurer, the Open Structures Art Society (whose members range from István Nádler to Katalin Hetey) regularly stages exhibitions both in Hungary and abroad, based on their joint collection and documentation archive, which is an outstanding testimony of geometric creation in Hungary and the world over the past decades.
The Mobile MADI Museum is the collection of a group of artists.
The private holdings of Lóránd Hegyi or the late Éva Körner and Ottó Mezei are examples of collections put together by art historians, and the list goes on.
Those Hungarian artists who do have some recognition abroad (typically neo-conceptual mid-career figures, such as Róza El-Hassan, Attila Csörgő, or the Kis Varsó duo) are under-represented in Hungarian collections. In contrast, the most sought-after local artists (e.g. Imre Bukta, László feLugossy) have limited reference abroad.
!! Among the collectors, only those have a chance of making a name abroad who mix Hungarian positions with international art. Some of these people live abroad (e.g. Gábor Hunya in Vienna, András Szöllősi-Nagy in Paris), while recently a few businessmen based in Hungary have also begun buying internationally (e.g. László Gerő, Ferenc Karvalits, Béla Horváth). The taste of this narrow elite is similar to the choices of new collectors elsewhere in Eastern Europe: they try to lift their respective local artists onto a higher echelon of international recognition by buying blue-chip foreign artists from respected galleries.

via guy
nie hypoteza a dokazat ju, nie generalizovat, ale deskriptivne, opisat to co clovek vidi
a potom for ideas ktore emerged from the descriptions
neutekat za velkymi teoriami, ale drzat sa tych malych ktore vyvstavaju z mojich opisov
nemat na zaciatku kategorie, ale mat len descriptions, a z nich kategorie
generation of theory from data in the process of conducting research ~ pocas monoskop vyskumu som mal o vsetkom blogovat a mali mi vyvstavat otazky a male teorie
zo social sciences pochadza
“reverse engineered hypothesis” :)

by Glaser & Strauss, 1967, sociologists

In a way GT resembles what many researchers do when retrospectively formulating new hypotheses to fit data. However, in GT the researcher does not pretend to have formulated the hypotheses in advance since preformed hypotheses are prohibited.
Glaser: all is data
GT has the goal of generating concepts that explain people’s actions regardless of time and place. The descriptive parts of a GT are there mainly to illustrate the concepts.

If your research goal is accurate description, then another method should be chosen since GT is not a descriptive method. Instead it has the goal of generating concepts that explain people’s actions regardless of time and place. The descriptive parts of a GT are there mainly to illustrate the concepts.
In most behavioral research endeavors persons or patients are units of analysis, whereas in GT the unit of analysis is the incident.
When comparing many incidents in a certain area, the emerging concepts and their relationships are in reality probability statements.
A GT is never right or wrong, it just has more or less fit (ako blizko maju koncepty k udalostiam ktore reprezentuju), relevance, workability and modifiability.
GT is not concerned with data accuracy as in descriptive research but is about generating concepts that are abstract of time, place and people.

1. all is data
2. open / substantive coding – poznamky k naskumanym udalostiam, riadok po riadku, opakovane zgrupit do konceptov a tie porovnavat s udalostami a refinovat ich
3. selective coding – nan prist ked som nasiel ‘tentative core’ (core variable), potom core guiding my coding. nevsimat si moc koncepty ktore sa jadra a podjadier netykaju. teda theoretical sampling – deduktivna cast GT
4. theoretical codes – pogrupovat fragmentarne koncepty do hypotez
5. memoing – core stage of GT. “Memos are the theorizing write-up of ideas about substantive codes and their theoretically coded relationships as they emerge during coding, collecting and analyzing data, and during memoing”. Memoing is total creative freedom without rules of writing, grammar or style.
6. sorting – memos are sorted, which is the key to formulate the theory for presentation to others. lots of new ideas emerge, which in turn are recorded in new memos
7. writing – The theoretical density should be dosed so concepts are mixed with description in words, tables, or figures to optimize readability. In the later rewriting the relevant literature is woven in to put the theory in a scholarly context.
No pre-research literature review [naive? risk of rediscovering the theories]. The literature shThis leads to a research practice where data sampling, data analysis and theory development are not seen as distinct and disjunct, but as different steps to be repeated until one can describe and explain the phenomenon that is to be researched. This stopping point is reached when new data does not change the emerging theory anymore.ould instead be read in the sorting stage being treated as more data to code and compare with what has already been coded and generated.
No taping (and transcribing) interviews – waste of time. staci field-noting interviews.
No talk. Talking about the theory before it is written up drains the researcher of motivational energy. Talking about the GT should be restricted to persons capable of helping the researcher without influencing her final judgments.

The research principle behind grounded theory is neither inductive nor deductive, but combines both in a way of abductive reasoning (coming from the works of Charles Sanders Peirce).
This leads to a research practice where data sampling, data analysis and theory development are not seen as distinct and disjunct, but as different steps to be repeated until one can describe and explain the phenomenon that is to be researched. This stopping point is reached when new data does not change the emerging theory anymore.

(‘neutralny’ opis spolocnosti je falosny)
Zizek sees that the description
of the society that purported to be “neutral” would not
be objective, but would formally be “false” because it would
involve accepting the existing order. In a manner that is
reminiscent of Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional
and Critical Theory,” Zizek reads Lukács as maintaining
that a critical theory must recognize its own situatedness
and its own commitments to political action and social
transformation. Zizek wants to follow Lukács by showing
that historicism is not sufficiently historicist because it does
not give an account of itself as a social phenomenon and is
thus incomplete. Zizek maintains that social theory cannot
be objective in the sense of being politically “neutral,” and it
is incomplete unless it takes its own social embeddedness
into account. An important aspect of what the critical social
theory would have to explain is a question that traditional
theory ignores: Why does it meet with resistance? In this
respect for Zizek critical social theory is similar to psychoanalytic
theory, which also has to explain why its explanations
are often resisted at first by patients.
+
Saying that a
theory is partial is not the same as saying that it is false insofar
as partial representation is not the same as misrepresentation
or distortion.
(==> lukacs kritizoval ze ciastocna teoria je falosna, ze vtedy ide ‘len’ o jednu z perspektiv,
ktora zahrna len ciastocny obraz socialnej reality, ktora teda nie je objektivna, treba celostnu,
resp vedomie “imputed” to the class—-[to som nepochopil dobre];
kym zizek tvrdi ze angazovana ciastocna je ok kym som si vedomy ze je ciastocna lebo je pravdiva,
kedze ciastocna reprezentacia nie je to iste ako misrepresentation or distortion.
cize je ok teoretizovat localised case studies, napriklad na zaklade honest autobiografie).
+
critique of ideology:
Marx @ Capital: “They do not know it, but they are doing it.”
Zizek via Sloterdijk about it: Marx is interpreted wrongly and should go
“They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.”
~ instead of “we misrecognize what is really going on”, it suggests
“we misrecognize that nothing is really going on”.
This thought that things seem to be one
way but really are another way implies that there is a level
of reality that could be grasped correctly. Zizek manages to
disrupt this traditional epistemological understanding of
the distinction between appearance and reality.
& false: “reality is just an illusion”.
“ideology has nothing to do with ‘illusion'”.
“social reality” is an “ethical construction”.
+
the totality is encountered in its purest form when it fails, and when one
tries to distance oneself from it in order to maintain one’s
own purity.
+
“purity is the most perfidious form of ‘cheating.’ ”
+
(pochopit to v celku – to nejde – ale nechcem si to priznat –
nechcem vidiet ze si to neviem priznat)
Reality is usually thought of in terms of everything
that is the case, and it is also assumed that everything
coheres with everything else to form a totality, whether one
can grasp this totality or not. Generally it is granted that the
human mind cannot grasp the totality. If that is so, it can reasonably
be asked whether this notion of the totality is not
simply a product of the imagination. Zizek’s statement that
the totality, which is impossible, tries to cover up its own
impossibility, is admittedly paradoxical. How could something
that did not exist cover up its own nonexistence? The
answer depends on a psychoanalytic premise that
the fantasy desires to hide from itself its own inability to face up
to the nonexistence and the impossibility of its fantasized object.
+
(?) instead of thinking of reality as a given that is
antecedent to experience, one must try to think of reality as a
failed effect
+
If consciousness is nothing but the consciousness of
something other than it, and if that which is other-than-it is
nothing in itself, then it is not surprising that consciousness
is inscrutable.
“Consciousness, in effect, equals anxiety.”
+
the anxious awareness of mortality is not simply one
among many aspects of conscious awareness, but its “very
zero-level.” ~ [anthropocentric humanism]
+
“very model of self-awareness”: “ ‘I
know very well that I am mortal, but nevertheless. . . . (I do
not accept it; I unconsciously believe in my immortality,
since I cannot envisage my own death).’ ”
+
For Zizek poststructuralism is a misunderstanding
of French philosophy by North Americans:
“In short, an entity like ‘poststructuralist deconstructionism’
(the term itself is not used in France) comes into existence
only for a gaze that is unaware of the details of the
philosophical scene in France: this gaze brings together
authors (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, . . . ) who are
simply not perceived as part of the same épistème in
France.”68 On his view, to consider poststructuralism as a
form of critical theory is “a classification which is unthinkable
in France.”

media art undone conf @ TM 07.
Arns: drop ‘media’ from media art because we live media (via Kittler). media art is more contemporary than contemporary art.
Lialina: move media art to blogs.
Druckrey: force ourselves to start to think as art historians but by not becoming art historians but by re-writing the way art history has been written on our terms. Though I used this example of art in 1900 or october school, I don’t count them as an opposition. I just count them as those who have decided to speak for an entire 20st century, half of which belongs not to them but to us.

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The Charter of the Forest assumes a notion of the ‘commons’ or a practice of subsistence commoning in the hydrocarbon energy resources of the time. | they refer to those classes of people whose goal in economic life is the consumption of uses rather than the accumulation of money. In short, they refer to the Many not the Few | Subcommandante Marcos provided the voice of the Zapatistas and the indigenous people of Chiapas calling for the return of Article 27 and the ejidos, or common land, while reminding us of the Magna Carta. As the Many demand water, energy, and wherewithal against the surplus value hogged by the Few
http://www.metamute.org/en/Charters-of-Liberty-in-Black-Face-and-White-Face-Race-Slavery-and-the-Commons

user is not only consumer, but always-already also creates a value; financial crisis (2008) ~ collapse of system of consumerism; Stiegler’s “associated media” (web2) ~ new form of capitalism (not end of it); old school consumerism = dissassociated media (financial crisis is also effect of the end of this kind of world); CC – new form of intellectual property; “process of transindividuation”; co-individuation – we exchange music files and thus transform our musical taste / we produce metadata / produce links / produce attractor, which becomes meta-stabilisation (eg musical fashion); it’s both bottom-up (peer-to-peer) and top-down (owned by companies) = this is the CONFLICT ~ role of philosopher is to produce critique of top-down logic (not denialisation, because we need this logic); we need power developed through “critical apparatuses”; interests of bottom-up VS top-down are not the same (like workers VS capital), but they need each other (workers need get work from capital)

Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory, are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4

In Anglophone and international media studies, “media” mostly stands for contemporary mass media, with traditional media studies covering news media, radio and TV and “new media” researching computing and Internet. | In the last decade, German humanities have developed a broad, general and transhistorical notion of media as “mediality” (“Medialität”) in which any material or imaginary carrier of information qualifies as a medium, from CPUs to angels. The notion of “medium” has thus replaced and superseded the older semiotic-structuralist term of the “sign”. | “Kulturwissenschaft” thus should not be mixed up with Anglo-American “cultural studies”. In the German context, it means cross-disciplinary humanities study of the arts and history of knowledge. | “cultural studies” of the Birmingham School were a straightforward adaption of the 1970s post-Frankfurt School German “Kultursoziologie”. | books of Anthony Grafton are Kulturwissenschaft while those of the Birmingham School are not
http://medienumbrueche.uni-siegen.de/groups/medienwissenschaften/weblog/38962/Antworten_von_Florian_Cramer.html

German media theory that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s | Siegen, Freiburg, Kassel | philosophical underpinnings: There must be reference, something outside of the text, beyond hermeneutics. The exodus of spirit out of humanities. Desire for reference. Then there is the substance concept. Obviously there is deconstruction of subject. Special interest in history and fascination for philosophical antropology and long cultural shifts (dating 50k-100k years back). Early pressure, and desire, ever since Humboldt and the way he designed the university system, to innovate. Ordinary knowledge needs to be taught in highschool or polytechnics. The university is a place for new thinking. This could explain why there is a permanent revolution inside the German universities ever since the post-war era. | Kittler laments the lack of technological knowledge in the humanities and is sceptical about the wishy-washy term ‘media theory’ that has been misused to such a vast extend.
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2009/04/23/debating-german-media-theory-in-siegen/

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