How to Mutate an Artwork: Notes for a Program

In a 2012 essay for artpress 2, philosopher and critic Yves Cusset critiques the persistence of the 'Musée imaginaire' in curatorial practice, arguing that exhibitions often presuppose a common 'world of art' that does not exist. He proposes instead a 'pluriverse' of loosely connected worlds, where art appears in all of them. Cusset challenges analogical exhibition models that mirror their content, advocating for exhibitions that do not rely on analogy or presuppose shared meaning. He draws on Marcel Duchamp's readymades to argue for artworks as 'prototypes'—unstable states of a project that can be reactivated. The essay culminates in a concrete experiment at MAC/VAL, where three works (Felice Varini's 'Trois cercles désaxés', Françoise Henry and Laurent Bolognini's 'Electra des Alternateurs volants', and Thierry Kuntzel's 'Peau') were reconfigured as 'prototypical moments' of a fictional project about the fourth dimension and local becoming. Cusset calls for a critical practice akin to science fiction, making artworks 'mutate' through contact with non-artistic practices.