e-flux is an international network that consists of a news service about conventional exhibitions, conferences, or book launches and a journal. It is a self-organizing platform for communications on contemporary art within the context of the global culture industry and contemporary artists working with their materials in a variety of different, and more often hybrid, ways.

In Comrades of Time in Journal no 11 (12/2009) that addresses contemporary art Boris Groys says:

A work of art is traditionally understood as something that wholly embodies art, lending it an immediately visible presence. When we go to an art exhibition we generally assume that whatever is there on display—paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, readymades, or installations—must be art. The individual artworks can of course in one way or another make reference to things that they are not, maybe to real-world objects or to certain political issues, but they are not thought to refer to art, because they themselves are art. However, this traditional assumption has proven to be increasingly misleading. Besides displaying works of art, present-day art spaces also confront us with the documentation of art. We see pictures, drawings, photographs, videos, texts, and installations—in other words, the same forms and media in which art is commonly presented

when it comes to art documentation, art is no longer presented through these media, but is simply referred to. For art documentation is per definitionem not art. Precisely by merely referring to art, art documentation makes it quite clear that art itself is no longer immediately present, but rather absent and hidden.

So the question arises: How can a contemporary artist survive this popular success of contemporary art? Or, how can the artist survive in a world in which everyone can, after all, become an artist?