Chalk Steps on the Museum Floor

Abstract

This article argues against the well-established wisdom in sociology of art that a sudden artistic or institutional gesture can `elevate' an ordinary object to the status of `artwork'. Instead, it affirms that there is a gradual process of `becoming art'. The mechanism of artistic activity does not consist of a single transformation of one huge difference into something artistically significant; it is rather related to the deployment of various small objective differences, their extension, intensification, repetition, and stabilization. It is the tempo of transformation that matters, but not the nature of these differences. Located in the objects, they are empirically describable. That is why the article follows ethnographically the process of installation of a chalk Bruegel copy on the floor of Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1999 and depicts different sequences and rhythms of change in the materiality of all participants in an art installation.