It is one of our culture’s peculiar contradictions that we invoke the freedom of art while romanticising the uncertainty of its creation with something approaching reverence. As though uncertainty were not only a condition of creative insight, but also an economic virtue. As though the radical nature of a thought could be measured by the fragility of the life that brought it into being.
Yet there is a world of difference between the risk of an artistic decision and the precariousness of a life. A work can lose its form, shake a conviction, destroy a familiar conception of beauty. Therein lies its potential, perhaps even its necessity. But the fact that the person creating it has to worry about paying the next month’s rent lends it neither depth nor truthfulness. Poverty is no muse. More often than we would care to admit, it is the silent destroyer of the time art needs to move beyond what is already known.
This week’s articles, from 23 to 30 October, touch on this relationship in different ways. They range from the financial risks of freelance artistic work and the responsibilities of collecting institutions to the moral upheaval of a theatrical character and the material threats to our cultural memory. What initially appears to be a series of unrelated subjects can be read as the expression of a deeper question: what forms of security does a society need if it wishes to retain the freedom to question its own certainties?
When certainty loses its innocence
In Suzie Miller’s ‘Inter alia’, whose German-language premiere Anna Stiepani is directing at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus on 31 October, a judge finds herself in a conflict that reaches far beyond personal tragedy. Her convictions collide with her closeness to her accused son. What held firm as a moral order as long as it remained abstract must suddenly prove itself amid a deeply personal entanglement.
Our preview asks: ‘How much certainty can the stage bear?’
Perhaps theatre’s real challenge lies precisely in the way it deprives us of the comfortable distance between judgement and life. As long as justice is a principle, it is easy to endorse. Once it touches our own child, our own love, our own history, the temperature of concepts changes. What seemed self-evident a moment ago becomes contradictory, without simply losing its validity.
Art worthy of the name need not resolve such contradictions. It may leave us in a state in which our moral categories have not become meaningless, but have lost their supposed innocence. Insight does not always emerge where a judgement is reached. Sometimes it begins only when we encounter the limits of our capacity to judge.
This is precisely where an artistic risk lies that has nothing to do with material vulnerability. On the contrary: those who fear for their livelihood will not necessarily act more courageously. Necessity can breed invention, but it can just as easily force people to repeat what has already proved successful. Where every failure can become a personal catastrophe, the predictable gains an economic advantage. In this way, a culture that demands the new might be the very thing that prevents it from emerging.
Our article ‘Zwischen zwei Aufträgen: Wer trägt das Erwerbsrisiko freier Kunst?’ (Between Commissions: Who Bears the Financial Risk of Freelance Art?) therefore touches a sensitive point of responsibility in cultural policy. The crucial question is not simply what art we want to make possible, but who is in a position to take on the risk of creating it at all.
For a society that makes artistic freedom conditional on a willingness to forgo a secure livelihood has already made a selection. It favours those with private safety nets, and may then call the result artistic independence. In this way, the promise of cultural openness can become an invisible social barrier.
The institution and its blind spot
Yet security has its own peculiar dialectic. What opens up spaces of freedom can also close them off over time. Institutions develop memories, but habits too. They preserve works, standards and traditions; sometimes, in doing so, they unwittingly also preserve the conditions underlying the exclusions from which their collections and their understanding of themselves emerged.
The ALBERTINA and its exhibition ‘HER STORY’ touch on precisely this tension. Our article ‘Künstlerinnen ausstellen – und dann anders sammeln?’ (Exhibiting Women Artists – and Then Collecting Differently?) poses a question that extends beyond a single exhibition. For making overlooked artistic practices visible after the fact is not yet the same as changing the mechanisms that determine what becomes visible and what falls into oblivion.
Every collection is also a history of decisions left unmade. What was not acquired, not exhibited, not written about does not necessarily disappear from the world, but it does disappear from the institutionally sanctioned image of its culture. The canon then appears to be a record of what matters, although it is always also a document of historical power relations, limited perspectives and missed opportunities.
A living cultural institution ought to derive its capacity for self-correction precisely from its permanence. Not every tradition deserves to be dismantled, and not every innovation amounts to an insight. But the authority of what has been preserved must not be confused with the infallibility of its selection.
Here lies a more demanding conception of institutional security: not a guarantee of continuing unchanged, but the possibility of changing without being destroyed in the process.
This does, however, also require accountability. Public funding cannot remove the obligation to make decisions transparent, review access and limit power. The freedom of art does not mean freedom from criticism for its institutions. There is a distinction between political interference in artistic content and democratic accountability for public funds, and careful attention to it is indispensable to both sides.
What we protect – and what must remain open
When it comes to protecting our cultural heritage, the matter initially seems simpler. When museums, archives and other cultural institutions form emergency response networks to prepare for disasters, uncertainty is not a value to be defended. Fire, water and destruction possess no aesthetic innocence. A lost work does not become more significant because its loss could have been prevented.
Here, responsibility means allowing chance as little power as possible. Cultural assets need protective spaces, documentation, reliable partnerships and the unglamorous organisational care without which centuries of human experience can be erased in a matter of hours.
And yet it would be a consequential mistake to turn the necessary security of objects into a demand for certainty about their meanings.
We do not preserve art so that it will tell us the same thing for ever. Cultural memory is not a sealed archive of settled truths. Its real vitality lies in the ability of works handed down to us to raise new questions in every present: in the way their meanings shift, in the way they become strange to us and, precisely through that strangeness, offer us fresh insight.
Perhaps this reveals the difference between preservation and ossification. One protects the possibility of future encounters. The other attempts to determine their outcome in advance.
Responsible cultural policy ought to be able to distinguish between the two. It should strengthen the material and institutional conditions for artistic work without seeking to administer its inner movement. It may ask how funds are used, decisions made and spaces of freedom made accessible. But it should resist the temptation to measure artistic significance by predictable effects, social approval or short-term utility.
For art is not a procedure for confirming what a society already knows about itself. It is one of those rare human activities in which the not-yet-thought can take form without first having to prove its usefulness.
This requires neither the glorification of deprivation nor the illusion of complete security. It requires a culture of responsibility that does not confuse vulnerability with creative freedom, or make institutional stability a pretext for intellectual immobility.
Perhaps the true measure of a culturally open society lies not in how resolutely it defends its convictions, but in how much uncertainty it can bear without pulling the ground from beneath the feet of those who create it.
We should not protect art from risk. We should prevent the price of its daring from destroying the freedom from which it emerges.
Original reviewed by the editors · 30 October 2026
