Planning in art triggers a depressive chain of associations from Plato to the specifics of the contemporary creative economy. Meanwhile, the society still vests artists with an exclusive right to produce the unplanned. Since the socialist realism was defeated by Polock, it is commonly believed that spontaneous freedom associated with innovation gained the victory over the controlled planned conservatism. Yet, we cannot but admit that the modernist art of the 20th century has its own laboratory, the historical avant-garde, where formal matrixes of “the unplanned” were derived for the first time to be used throughout the whole 20th century. That is, we can say that the boundaries of the new have always been limited, both formally and conceptually.
This limitedness was used to equal advantage of anti-modernist enemies of contemporary art and its “in-house” critics pointing to its insufficient radicality. And sometimes their critical jokes or caricatures of artists pressing by all means for innovations would suggest artistic statements that predicted the future of art to come. It was possible because formal mutations of already existing elements have always been the only unit of evolution in the narrative on the history of art. Of course, artists who live in a specific historical context focus most of their efforts around particular personal or social content of art, the ingenuity of each new production, and the need to make this art visible for the art system etc. But if one has enough information, he or she can easily construct new art pieces through combining and accelerating existing tendencies as it was in case of soviet anti-modernistic propaganda (here is a funny example of a soviet cartoon from 1960s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO9GocfHyv0).
Thus, knowing of formal limits and unit of historical linear/nonlinear evolution measurement provide for the opportunity to set up a speculative experiment to calculate mathematically the full multitude of all possible formal mutations. Which means, to create a detailed map of the possible history of contemporary art in the form we know it today. We can picture a situation with a sufficient number of fictitious or living artists who will be able to bring the outcomes to life, if necessary. What could a scanning of potential history of the future like that change? More than likely, it would put a logical end to the project of contemporary art but not to art per se. Invention of the photo camera didn’t kill painting, the latter just had to mutate and shed some of the illusions about its role and purpose. Similarly, instant actualization of all possible incarnations of contemporary art will reveal the need to reconsider the meaning and capabilities of art as such.
I do believe that today’s transformations indicate that steps in this direction do take place, whether we want it or not. For example, we can cite here the strengthening trend towards the “growth” of art makers and therefore complicity of their results. Even if it’s an individual artist, there is usually an intricate multistage production cycle. There are examples like e-flux, which is a large institution, an artist, and media at the same time, monitoring each stage of the production cycle. This implies that even today, the rate of artistic production industrialization offers the opportunity to create projects smoothing the way for art to reach its limits.