Das unbekannte Meisterwerk

At the end of the 1980s, a group of artist friends began questioning the localization of art. Was art based in the personality of the artist, or in the bohemian society around them, in the theoretical concept or even in the artistic object itself? To Günther Förg, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Heimo Zobernig it became clear that in the future, concept and context would acquire a previously unknown significance ("In the future we will no longer make, only think," as Kippenberger put it). A decisive aspect of their discourse was the 1831 novella The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac.