The Wall of the World

This chapter takes up the crisis of the work of art in the epoch of social systems from another side.. The crisis of the art work now has become a way of posing the problem of action and intention in autotropic (self-turned) systems. The art work now resembles a practical joke: a staging of reality that one for a moment takes as real and that collapses when exposed. The sudden collapse of the Berlin wall, triggered by a media confusion, serves as one example. The novels of Agatha Christie—the most popular writer in world history—provide another.