In the early 1980s, the cultural scholar Lewis Hyde famously claimed that art is a gift. To be sure, it is also a commodity, but even more than in the realm of economics, art belongs in the realm of the gift: while it could exist without markets, it could never escape its gift character, insisted Hyde (1983). In the last few years, these reflections have been taken up again, and there is also an increasing number of exhibitions, plays, and performances that deal with the issue of giving and exchanging. Usually, these works do not reflect the gift on an abstract level but aim at generating and performing gift relationships by means of interaction and participation (Hentschel, 2018).

There are also artworks, however, which address the gift in its more theoretical dimensions. Thus, a pioneering exhibition, which would inspire many more, took place in Milan in 2001: “The Gift: Generous Offerings, Threatening Hospitality” (Maraniello et al, 2001). The American artist Ted Purves (1964– 2017) wanted to demonstrate the myriad forms of giving that pervade our everyday lives, and performed the gifting of artworks to the public in many collaborative projects; his book What We Want Is Free appeared in 2005. The motto of the “Black Market of Knowledge” in Graz, Austria, organized by German curator and dramaturg Hannah Hurtzig in 2007, was “The Gift and Other Violations of the Principle of Exchange.” And in 2017, the exhibition “Who Pays?” took place at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein which brought together “artistic positions from the 1960s to the present” to “examine our notions of wealth and poverty, of give and take, and of participation from different angles, concepts that nowadays are mostly reduced to purely economic aspects” (2017). The curators in Vaduz prominently featured Joseph Beuys’ adage “Art = Capital” which expresses his trademark “extended definition of art.” To Beuys, the greatest capital of a society is its citizens’ creativity, a point to which I will return shortly.

Theoretizations

Now, what does the gift have to do with art, with beauty and aesthetics anyway? Is Hyde correct in assuming that there can be no art without gifts? To answer these questions, we have to go a little deeper.