Who is doing art in “Emperor’s New Clothes”? Dressmakers of invisible clothes, or a boy who cries “The Emperor is naked!”, or Emperor himself? Who is Emperor in this tale, who is artist and who is impostor?

Lets take “Emperor’s New Clothes” as tale about ineffable.
Let’s take art as tale: for art to appear it must be imagined. Not only for work of art, but for the art itself, “the willing suspension of disbelief” (S. T. Coleridge, 1817) is required. It’s some kind of belief or addiction. Marcel Duchamp ones said: “Art is a habit-forming drug, that’s all it is, for the collector, for the artist, for anybody connected with art. It has absolutely no existence as such, as veracity or truth of any kind… It’s a drug. Like religion to the Russians… ”( interview with Calvin Tomkins, 1964).
Lets take the Empire as illusion that there is no illusion. It is our only reality, in which what we want overlaps with what we need which overlaps with what we deserve. The Empire is state of mind and way of life. It’s the Empire of possible: enduring perpetuated self-illusion that nothing else except the Empire could be experienced or imagined.
But with art unimaginable emerges – unconceivable, unfathomable, impossible, ineffable. Unimaginable is resistant towards the corruption of inevitable Empire. But who is doing art here – dressmakers of invisible clothes, or a boy who cries “The Emperor is naked!”, or Emperor himself? Who is Emperor in this tale, who is artist and who is impostor?
There are three types of art discernable in the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. We will see what are they and what are their outcomes. Ultimate effect of art: emergence of unimaginable and ineffable revokes the established order dominant in us and among us. That’s what’s this tale is all about.

Sreten Ugričić, Research Fellow at Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Luzern. Born 1961 in Jugoslavija, country which doesn’t exist. Author of ten books: novels, short stories, essays and theoretical texts. Director of the National Library of Serbia from 2001 to 2012. In January 2012, after publicly supporting freedom of speech in Serbia, he was accused by the Serbian Minister of the Interior for supporting terrorism. Serbian government dismisses him on the fictional („telephone“) session and since then he lives abroad.


© Milad Ahmadvand