None of these escape attempts succeeded in destroying the institution. Their respective impacts – if any – on everyday life were shortlived , and the fact that we still know about them today is due to their letter-day assumption into the institutions. The dilemma of the specialized or, if you like, personal project versus the claim to universality would therefore appear to be unsolvable. Disbanding the institution automatically involves disbanding the concept of art – making Barbara Kruger merely a commercial designer and no longer an artist. Preserved, the institution remains a repository for what has stood the test of time, the frame of reference for everything of cultural value. It is of course possible that none of the survivors of this age’s rapidly changing fashions will be deemed worth preserving by the next generation. Museums – as is already the case with the big opera houses – would then be nothing but repositories for classics, without vigorous additions. Qualitatively superior cultural products would then, as intimated in the comment on the American verdict quoted above, be totally marginalized, meaning that there would be virtually no public for them and that they would no longer be products of culture in the narrow sense of the term. The only ‘living’ art would be television, and the artist would host a talkshow.

Be that as it may, nothing is predictable in the long-term view of culture. Such considerations – despite the impossibility of resolving the said dilemma – could encourage representatives of a high-quality culture to keep on rooting for public art. Criticism and protest from the directly involved public are forms of active debate, in contrast to advertising’s goal of manipulating – preferably unnoticed – passive perception. Seen from this angle there is certainly some virtue in the aesthetic ‘stumbling-block’, if only as an exercise in a more conscious and critical approach to our overwhelmingly visual everyday environment.

Of course even television audiences have an inkling of ‘high culture’. The Greeks, the Mayas, the Mona Lisa, Rembrandt, the Impressionists, van Gogh, etc., probably strike a responsive chord in everyone. In all probability the fictive issue of whether to sustain our efforts to produce and preserve high cultural achievement would be agreed upon fairly quickly – that is why such a question is hardly ever asked. But as soon as a decision has to be taken about what is worth preserving, there is a parting of the ways. Here the museum’s function is to preserve everything a society’s conventions deem worthy of being preserved – ‘art’, for instance. Much of it will perhaps be scorned by the next generation, but there will be time for the preserved things to crystallize any cultural value they may possess.