On the ontological autonomy of the artistic event
For some days, I have been revisiting a question I have asked myself since my youth. If we watch a film at the cinema before reading about it, why do we assume that with contemporary art we must study it before we can observe it? I formulated this after leaving a museum: not because of the work itself, but upon realising that I was acting differently from the majority.
That discomfort is the subject. Not because the works are responsible for it, but because it reveals something I have been attempting to articulate for years: the distinction between art as an event and the social infrastructure that surrounds it. The work maintains a strong thesis: they are constantly conflated, and that confusion sustains a specific form of cultural elitism that is unnecessary.
I have just published version 2.3 of a work titled Art as Structural Surplus: Toward a Relational Ontology Beyond Human Authorship on PhilArchive and Zenodo. The paper argues that art is neither an intrinsic property of the object nor an exclusive expression of the subject, but a relational event. What ontologically distinguishes that event from any functional reorganisation is what I term structural surplus: a relational difference that reorganises the field of a system's possible configurations without being absorbed by its primary function.
The central consequence is what I wish to defend here. Structural surplus operates with ontological independence from recognition. It may emerge without any institution recording it. It may circulate in the market without producing it. The historical actualisation of the surplus as fully recognised art is a distinct matter—important, yet subsequent, and not constitutive of the event itself.
My friend, colleague, and associate Adolfo Cortés, while we were testing the thesis, proposed the example of Vivian Maier, who produced a photographic archive in Chicago and New York for decades that only began to be processed, exhibited, and interpreted after her negatives were recovered by chance at a storage auction in Chicago in 2007, two years before her death. If recognition were a necessary condition of the artistic event, we would have to maintain that Maier did not produce art until then, when someone finally found her boxes. That conclusion is counter-intuitive and false. Maier was producing art while she was producing it. The public actualisation arrived late. The temporal asymmetry between the production of surplus and the recognition of the field is one of the phenomena that my paper is designed to preserve.
I bring this thesis to the present. Data from the Spanish Survey of Cultural Habits and Practices demonstrates this: in the 2021-2022 cycle, only 1% of the population attended fairs or auctions, 0.7% purchased art, and 0.4% identified as collectors. And yet, those who do visit museums and exhibitions report a medium-high level of satisfaction. There is widespread aesthetic experience. There is a highly concentrated art market. Conflating these two realities is what produces the visitor discomfort with which I opened this text.
The visitor is not failing in their observation. They are reacting to a regime of social validation—price, fair, expert authority, institutional consecration—that presents itself as if it were the nature of art when it is merely its infrastructure. Bourdieu diagnosed this as distinction: taste functions as a marker of social position. Becker demonstrated that no work circulates in isolation, but through cooperative networks of galleries, critics, curators, and museums. Velthuis has explained how price in contemporary art operates as a hermeneutic argument, not merely an economic one. All of this is real and documented. However, none of these mechanisms is what art is. They are the infrastructure through which art circulates.
One must insist upon the dual direction of the asymmetry: surplus can erupt without recognition, and recognition can occur without surplus. A significant portion of art validated by the contemporary market is recognition without surplus — sensory sophistication absorbed by functions of spectacle, distinction, or institutional legitimation, without reorganising the system's horizon of possible configurations. And a significant portion of what effectively produces surplus remains rendered invisible by infrastructures that reward other things. The Cattelan case, with the banana fixed to the wall at Art Basel Miami 2019, is exemplary of the former situation. The public question the work triggered was not 'what do I feel before this?' but 'what does it signify that others have assigned 120,000 dollars to this?'. That question is not formulated by the work; it is formulated by the market, which endorses it onto the work and converts it into its content.
In light of this, my thesis carries a practical implication that warrants explicit statement: the spectator’s initial gaze is ontologically legitimate. Empirical psychology regarding aesthetic experience—the Leder model and subsequent research—demonstrates that perceptual and affective responses precede elaborate interpretation. This initial response is not an error that contextualisation must rectify. It constitutes a legitimate entry into the work. Contextualisation may indeed enrich the experience. Yet, it may also bias it, particularly when the dominant context is hierarchical rather than pedagogical.
The consequence is clear. The objective is not to eliminate mediation—which is impossible, as mediation is omnipresent—but to transform its social function. The initial gaze must be decoupled from market signals. Curatorial interest must be distinguished from commercial success. The spectator’s doubt must be normalised. And, as far as my own contribution is concerned, one must rigorously maintain that the ontology of the artistic event is not reduced to the history of its recognition.
The conversation with Adolfo
This is the position I shall bring to the joint paper I am to begin working on with Adolfo Cortés García in the coming weeks. Adolfo will work from a position we believe to be entirely convergent, albeit distinct: the articulation between work and recognition as a co-evolutionary process. A complementary perspective, formulated from a different tradition and with a different emphasis.
I have considered that the most honest method of commencing our collaboration is for each of us to publish our starting position beforehand. This text represents my own, and I invite Adolfo to share his with us. The joint paper will follow, as an exercise in convergence between two clearly formulated positions—not as a fusion that dilutes both for the sake of courtesy, but as a genuine philosophical conversation.
Should anyone wish to intervene in this matter from the fields of sociology, art history, or aesthetic philosophy, this notebook remains open. It serves as a laboratory: the joint paper will be improved by the public nature of the preceding conversation.
Sources
Esteban Ruiz, J. A. (2026). Art as Structural Surplus: Toward a Relational Ontology Beyond Human Authorship (V2.3). PhilArchive https://philpapers.org/rec/ESTAAS-2 and Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20020706
Ministry of Culture. Survey of Cultural Habits and Practices in Spain 2021-2022. https://www.cultura.gob.es/servicios-al-ciudadano/estadisticas/cultura/mc/ehc/portada.html
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge, 1984 (orig. 1979).
Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. University of California Press, 1982.
Velthuis, Olav. Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Leder, H., Belke, B., Oeberst, A., & Augustin, D. (2004). A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. British Journal of Psychology, 95(4), 489-508. https://doi.org/10.1348/0007126042369811
Regarding Vivian Maier: official archive at https://www.vivianmaier.com; documentary Finding Vivian Maier (Maloof and Siskel, 2013).
Regarding Comedian (Maurizio Cattelan, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2019): coverage in Artnet News, The New York Times, and Perrotin Gallery, December 2019.