Can exhibitions contribute to research?
The curators don't need to know beforehand what's going to happen.
The financial and logistical effort involved in exhibitions makes it unlikely that this condition of curiosity, not wanting to know too soon, is given all too often.
So-called research in the humanities now benefits from the fact that it takes place practically behind closed doors.
It usually goes unnoticed that most publications in art history or literary studies either make interpretations of artefacts or compile factual knowledge without revealing anything new in the narrower sense of the unknown and at the same time interesting.
Nevertheless, the images of the laboratory and the experiment are common in the self-promotion of humanities institutions.
When a museum undertakes an experimental setup, the setups are not metaphorical.
Patrick Bahners
Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".
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Existing objects that are not self-evident but cannot be deduced from interpretation alone are well suited as a research object: a document, something that is as objective as possible, dry, yes, brittle – like a list of names.
That was the idea of an exhibition by the German Historical Museum last year, which can be called ingenious.
The "List of the God-gifted" is a compilation of artists who, by order of the National Socialist Minister of Culture Goebbels, were exempted from the obligation to make sacrifices for the people as a whole.
In Berlin, the visual artists on the list were taken on.
The selection mechanisms of art funding
Most names mean nothing to today's audience;
the exhibition showed what kind of works the artists produced after the list had served its purpose, but those who were favored in this way could no longer align their work with National Socialist guidelines.
Questions were produced by the ironic contrast between the extreme concentration of the cultural-political will to have an effect in the original list and the diffuse normality of post-war production with a focus on the genre of art in buildings.
Patterns of careers became apparent, stimulating art-sociological generalizations: the autonomy aesthetics of the artistic status secured by academic training favored adaptation.
But every case was different - the curators could do research.
A similar approach is now being pursued by an exhibition at the Center for Persecuted Arts in Solingen, which is part of the unofficial accompanying program of the Documenta, so to speak.
Here there are two lists of artists whose juxtaposition raises questions about the selection mechanisms of art funding, which is a prestige project for both the sponsor and the recipient.
The Solingen center, a department of the municipal art museum in the former town hall of Gräfrath, works together with the Kassel "documenta archive".
A comparison is made between the first Documenta of 1955 and the "Fourth Great Kassel Art Exhibition", an exhibition of contemporary art that the Kunstverein für Kurhessen, founded in 1835, organized four years before the National Socialists took power.