Anonymous art reconsidered: anonymity and the contemporary art institution

ABSTRACT In museums, private collections, and public spaces, there is a myriad of artworks that remain anonymous. This article examines a specific subset of anonymous art, which seems to have a marginal role in collecting and in institutional practices: anonymous artworks from the modern and contemporary period that are neither museum artefacts nor public artworks. As it turns out, this kind of anonymous art is a puzzling category for the art institution and audience alike. Since the conception of the readymade and pop art, the most trivial objects can be reiterated in the artistic sphere, yet even so these anonymous artworks lack the underlying condition for their artistic recognition, which is centred upon the agency of the artist. In addition, the intricate and flexible sociality of artists, objects, and audiences within the institutional framework of art renders the case of anonymous art even more perplexing. Following an original exhibition of a collection of anonymous artworks, this essay investigates these perplexities. It argues that the aforementioned kind of anonymous artwork provides valuable insights into the limits of the contemporary art institution. Hence, within the complex layers of contemporary representations, it has the potential for empowering the aesthetic and cultural constellations of the individual spectator while offering new possibilities for collectors.


Introduction
A wide array of artworks-major and minor paintings and sculptures, written texts and oral traditions, graffiti and public monuments, ceremonial objects and applied craftsmanship-are destined to remain the products of anonymous creators. Cities, museums, and various cultures are all inundated with anonymous works of art. Anonymity is thus hardly a new challenge for aesthetics and audience reception. Since early modernity and the rise of the Western art institution, artists, antiquarians, and theoreticians alike have had to cope with the fact that for many significant artworks of the past there has been no evident source regarding the name of the artist.
Nevertheless, in visual arts the most salient and widely appreciated works of art are the works of identified individuals, from Michelangelo to Picasso. Although the belief in the charismatic and eponymous artist has had a profound influence on the establishment of the Western art institution, 1 there are numerous examples outside the West in which the custom of the eponymous master has played a key role. Even in ninth-century China, an art critic and collector (Chang-Yen-yüan) provided the cities of Changan and Luyang with a catalogue "[. . .] full of the names of great painters and their works as Baedeker's guide to Florence". 2 The same applies even to domains that generally are not associated in the West with fine arts, such as the tea ceremony in Japan, where the "iemoto" system has had different institutional and social resonances in addition to special hereditary practices for elite masters. 3 Name, authorship, and artistic authority are thus not a purely Western framework in the institutionalization of art.
Detailed authorship and extensive cataloguing is still preserved as the centre of museography and increasingly globalized contemporary art. Museums and various art institutions are forming vast electronic databases, accumulating more and more registers and names, and there is a growing mass of contemporary artwork that bears some kind of signature. The CONA (Cultural Objects Name Authority) 4 database of the Getty Research Institute is a clear indication of the sophistication and variability in current metadata cataloguing of artworks. Given the volume of art collections and the sheer expansion of contemporary art itself, it would actually be a very hard if not impossible task to determine whether the vast repositories of artworks are predominantly based on anonymous or identified artists.
Anonymous artworks in general are appreciated according to the cultural sphere in which they have been produced; that is to say, according to epoch, style, and overall cultural context. This is based logically upon the historical knowledge or even connoisseurship of the curator or spectator, while also being dependent upon the quantity of available information regarding the work of art. However, these criteria can be met, to a lesser or greater degree, when anonymous art is pre-modern-an ancient statue, or even the products of folk art, for examplebut they are much harder to meet when they concern modern and contemporary anonymous works of art for which sufficient information that might be used to ascribe to them a chronological, cultural, or institutional context is lacking. This article will discuss the aesthetic and cultural processes that are at work when confronted with this rather neglected kind of anonymity (all subsequent uses of the term "anonymous art" refer to this, unless otherwise stated). By situating it within the values and procedures of institutional artistic recognition, and by comparing it with other pervasive forms of art such as the readymade and the so-called "outsider art", this essay will argue that this kind of anonymous art presents many challenges to the art institution, and becomes highly pertinent to contemporary and heteroclite modes of experiencing cultural objects.

Visiting an anonymous art exhibition
In the city of Patras in western Greece, the fourth edition of RE-Culture was held from October to December 2016. This festival of contemporary art is organized biennially and simultaneously includes various other exhibitions. 5 Although, on this occasion, the festival focused predominantly on several eponymous artists, a specific exhibition was dedicated to anonymous art. More precisely, it hosted a private collection containing works bought over the years from flea markets and private owners, and whose current collector, quite ironically, wished also to remain anonymous. With the exception of a few works that displayed explicit details regarding their provenance and cultural context, most of the work made very ambiguous artistic and cultural references, and there was no easy way to determine the country of origin or even the approximate date of creation. Most of them could easily be situated within the last century, but apart from this there were no clear indications of their original place and time; not least for the audience, who, of course, did not have access to scientific analysis of the materials or to exact information regarding their purchase. For the purpose of this article, the author has chosen six works that exemplify this kind of ambiguity. Figures 1 and 2 are landscape paintings that display plenty of references to modernity, but their provenance could span the entire twentieth century. Figure 3 is a sketch, with clear cubist and constructivist influences, but which does not reveal further clues-it could be a preliminary drawing or even a sketch for a theatrical performance. Figure 4 is a painting of a female figure, with an interesting patchwork of colours that separates the canvas in a geometric fashion, possibly with strong expressionist influences. Figure 5 is created through mixed media and varied techniques, depicting two small figures, male and female, in a wooden frame, possibly handsculpted. Finally, Figure 6 seems like a painting of a fantasy landscape or even a Utopian architectural design. All of the above conjectures would be logical conjectures about the works that presuppose only a basic knowledge of twentieth-century art.
None of the artwork displayed in Figures 1-6 has considerably large dimensions, and the technique that may be discerned is relatively unremarkable (sketch, drawings, and one small-scale mixed-media object). This means that each of them may well be the work of a single individual, who, we may assume, may not have had many technical or even professional skills, such as those required in sculpting or in icon painting. Yet, it would be fair to suggest that the first four pictures show artworks that on first glance may be associated with highbrow art. Figure 1. Anonymous, drawing on paper, 58 × 39 cm, no date.
The modernist references and even the peculiarities (especially in the case of Figure 4) might suggest an artist with formal training who struggled to convey a significant degree of originality. Nevertheless, the point is that the variance in their date of creation could provoke major shifts in terms of their reception. If an audience knew that they were created in the 1910s, then necessarily, taking into account the way that institutional art has evolved throughout the last century, the way in which they would be assessed would be very different from a work made in the 1990s. In the former case, they could be associated with the pinnacle of artistic modernism, but if considered in the latter case they seem to be completely out of tune with the course of the art institution; they could thus even turn out to be the work of a hobbyist. So we see that in such examples of anonymous art, even highbrow works could not easily be separated from middlebrow or indeed lowbrow practices.   In Figures 5 and 6 the situation is more complex. For example, Figure 5 might be seen as portraying a peculiar everyday object, a kind of objet trouvé, but it might also be the work of an artist working along the lines of Joseph Cornell. In this case, it is not even clear whether we are indeed confronted with  something that was originally created and intended as an artwork; it is also possible that-as happens frequently with anonymous works of art produced in older eras-it had a very different use for its initial creators and owners. Yet, if this process is common among older, i.e. pre-modern, anonymous works, it is highly problematic for more recent objects for which there is no clear mark indicating whether they were initially works of art or were simply everyday objects. Figure 6 runs into the same problem, since it may oscillate between visual art and architecture. It is possible to take what little context is available and attempt to attribute these works within existing connoisseurship-in this case, modern and contemporary Greek art, since they are exhibited in Greece. A qualified connoisseur of this field could try to make conjectures about these works regarding a possible author, on the condition that she or he can track compelling similarities in the work of identified Greek artists. Yet, not only might this effort come to nothing, but it also demonstrates the persistent connection between authorship and connoisseurship even in artworks with relatively low market value and which are not socially conspicuous. Contrary to this standard institutional approach, this article will suggest that anonymous art may present different and more variable possibilities for its reception. First, however, the limits of authorship and anonymity within the institution of contemporary art will be discussed.

The limits of anonymity
It becomes rather evident that such a collection of anonymous art calls for a peculiar and ambiguous reception of the artworks. In general, when looking at modern and contemporary artworks, a lot of categorizations and procedures are in play, which, despite their highly malleable and open character, are still vital for the way that art is recognized and appreciated. Materials, history, themes, techniques, and agency are interlinked and tend to generate responses that may be unique among individual spectators. These implicit parameters are vital for the institutionalization of artworks, and remain embedded in modes of thought and judgement pertaining to the reception of art. But these cases of anonymous artworks also show that despite all the transgressions and claims within modern and contemporary art the issue of an identified creator still plays a strong role in the institutional understanding of artworks.
Several aspects within the theory of contemporary art, notably the artistic practice of "institutional critique", have been very critical against the centrality of an original creator as the main actor of art. 6 However, this hardly has signalled a complete shift from an artistcentred institutional framework. As Nathalie Heinich recently argued, contemporary artists still remain the focus of the art institution, and what has been strongly contested in artistic evaluation after modernism is only the condition that the artist must express her or his "interiority" in the artwork. 7 So, even if it is possible to consider various layers of institutionalization, from global-scale museums to local galleries in a peripheral city or to a student exhibition in a small campus, the common denominator across the pyramid of the artistic institution is the artist. Anonymous works of art not only conceal a lot of contextual information about the artwork, but most importantly in terms of their reception, bypass this building block of the artistic institution. Without an identified creator, anonymous art does not seem to provide a clear and standard negotiable foundation to determine its status within or without the artistic institution.
The perplexities that emerge from this kind of anonymous artwork are largely due to the complex variance of media and cross-cultural practices that are employed in contemporary institutional art. Anonymous art can create as well as complicate patterns of reception, since it adds, perhaps unwillingly, to the encompassing range of objects that can be considered artworks. Arthur Danto has demonstrated that the artistic institution has arguably reached its maximal scope in lieu of its potential to incorporate, through several layers of theoretical argumentation, everyday and common objects. 8 For Danto, this argumentation involves different sets of parameters, such as artistic gesture, modernistic claims, and participatory practices, unified within manifold and highly complex modes of thought and developed across artists, intermediaries, and the public. It is these frameworks that circumscribe the mode of existence of institutional art and not only its exhibition in a museum or a gallery.
Nevertheless, among these intricacies an identified artist remains logically the main carrier for the passage of the object into the sphere of the artistic institution. Curators such as Harald Szeeman-and one may also say collectors-can today acquire a creative status within the art institution. In contemporary art there is a certain interchangeable character among artists, curators, and collectors, whereby roles abruptly shift and alternate. 9 But again, eponymity still plays a significant role. The issue of authorship thus acquires new connotations and resonances in contemporary art that are linked to models of current economic and social values. For example, in contemporary art there are even phenomena of "branding", not only for artists but also for gallerists. 10 The anonymous artwork and the readymade A form of art that could be helpful for further investigation into the peculiarities of anonymous art is the readymade, a form that arguably has permitted the institution to expand its recognition to include a more comprehensive array of artworks. The readymade has undergone its own adventures during its institutional acceptance, but finally seems to have exerted a profound influence in how all forms of artwork are integrated in the art institution. Even Marcel Duchamp's famous Fountain (1918) has undergone a complex process of artistic recognition.- 11 The original was lost after its first exhibition in New York, and Duchamp was commissioned in the 1960s to remake exact replicas, signed under the original pseudonym "R. Mutt" (which in itself is an ironic but strong remark on the centrality of the name in the art institution). Nevertheless, the potentiality of the readymade transpired into all other artworks, even to those that were not readymades. As Thierry de Duve has argued, the readymade has had a latent impact in the reception of any subsequent art form, from monochrome painting to minimal art, despite the fact that key figures of contemporary art, such as Clement Greenberg and Joseph Kosuth, were vocally opposed to the practices of Duchamp. 12 In a certain sense, an anonymous work of art can be the opposite of the readymade or even the objet trouvé. In the readymade there is an identified (or pseudonymous) creator but an unidentified medium of art. In the anonymous artwork it is possible to reverse this: there may be a standard medium of art, for example painting, but not an identified creator. Yet it is also obvious that artistic recognition does not work equally in both ways. The subject (artist) seems to have a primacy over the object (artwork).
However, it could also be noted that it is mainly through the intermediacy and the encompassing character of the readymade that anonymous art can be considered as a distinct art form. This seems to be something that makes its scope all the more interesting. The starting point of anonymous art is not necessarily to provide examples of "good" painting or sculpture of which the creator is simply not known. In other words, through the readymade, anonymous art can participate in all the complexities of institutional artistic recognition. The question of why an object can be deemed artistic can span numerous reasons. Various audiences may hold very different, and indeed incompatible, criteria for assessing artworks, which are dependent not solely upon style and theme but also upon context and personal experiences and preferences.
This latent relationship with the readymade creates something of a paradox. On the one hand, the readymade has permeated the reception of art, and anonymous art can be filtered via the broad pervasiveness of the readymade, since every object may possess artistic potential. On the other hand, anonymous art seems to undermine the very premise of the readymade; that is, the centrality of the artist as the main actor of artistic propositions. Anonymous art can thus primarily present "objects of art" with a more open and negotiable reception; their difference from the readymade lies in the fact that they are stripped of the very thing that has led to the insertion of readymades into the scope of institutional expectation, namely an identified creator. Hence, it can be argued that anonymous art can return the artwork to a purer state of objecthood, in contrast to the readymade, which remains dependent upon the economic and cultural valuations of the artist.
In this grey area between objecthood and artwork, anonymous art seems to realize several modernist claims-the most evident being to obscure the limits of art and non-art. Even if these kinds of claims have been interiorized and played out in different ways within the art institution, anonymous art seems to have a capacity to re-pose them in a more direct manner. As it will be argued below, such a move should also be correlated to how representations and artworks continue to more flexibly revolve around the complex everyday life in metropolitan and digital cultures. But first it would be useful to relate anonymous art to two seemingly congenial forms of art: pseudonymous artworks and the socalled "outsider art".

Anonymity, pseudonymity, and outsider art
Pseudonymity has proved to be a vital practice for twentieth-century art, not only in the visual arts but also in literature. Pseudonymity has predominantly been used in a passive or protective manner; for example, to mask the identity of the writer or the artist in order to protect her or him from any spurious criticisms and even legal issues that may arise regarding her or his work. But further, pseudonymity has been an active cultural practice central to some artworks, especially in modernism. John Heartfield's (Helmut Herzfield) anglicization of his name was important for strengthening the political dimension of his collages in Nazi Germany. Duchamp's persona of Rose Selavy (a pun on the French expression rose c'est la vie) was important for his transvestite photographs by Man Ray and his mock-artwork Belle Haleine (1921); whereas his pseudonymic signature R. Mutt was an important tactic in his exhibition of Fountain (1917). In graffiti, pseudonymity is the norm for every signed work, and, as in the case of Banksy, it can have a major role in the reception and economic dimension of the artwork. The documentary (possibly a mockumentary) Exit through the Gift Shop (2010) makes a strong argument for the importance of a name in street art. In all these cases, pseudonymity may contribute to and even significantly strengthen the establishment of a creator. This is mainly because pseudonyms are usually constant in an entire series of work, and even sometimes for the whole of the artistic production of one person, highlighting creative patterns and authorship throughout different works.
Surprisingly, anonymous art may even be closer to a specific practice of pseudonymity that has retained a dubious status throughout modern art, namely forgery. In his extensive study of the subject, Thierry Lenain argued that despite the legal issues that have arisen from forged works of art, forgery can be a clear indication of the persistent, and at times haunting, character that authorship has achieved for the modern art institution. 13 Nevertheless, forgery has another, more artistic, dimension. It not only engages in a battle among connoisseurship, forensics, and mastery, but also implicitly involves the subject of the historicity of art. The paintings of Hans van Meegeren, for example, were not only masterful executions in the style of Vermeer but also probably the only way for the forger to guarantee that his artworks would be received in museums, since without the forged signature any kind of seventeenthcentury Dutch painting would, in the twentieth century, appear at best mere craftsmanship and at worst an anachronism. The forger thus engages with the shifts of art history and the values of the existing art institution. The same thing applies to anonymous art. The lack of a name and the lack of information regarding the provenance of an artwork signal a distance in the expectations of modern and contemporary art history. As with forgeries, anonymous works can also undermine the historical conventions of art. As shown in the previous examples, especially Figures  1-3, the missing date of the artwork compels us to process it from outside the prevalent framework of art history.
Similar cases may appear in what has been coined "art brut" or more generally "outsider art". As in anonymous art, the main hindrance to the institutional acceptance of outsider art had been the identification of a specified agent during the creation of the artwork-issues of intentionality and consciousness, and even prejudice against specific social categories, mainly against those who are regarded as mentally divergent. Outsider art in general, of course, involving naïf artists working on a solitary basis or at least outside the boundaries of the established art institution, has now become worldwide a very much accepted art form, with its proper market and museum institutions. As David McLagan has shown, the collecting practices of outsider art were not just about recording and saving the artworks, but also about playing a creative role in this institutional development. 14 But the whole category of outsider art is based on the premise of an identified creator, and one may argue that a common representation of the artist as "melancholic" and mentally unstable 15 has exerted a strong influence in shaping this kind of reception.
However, in contrast to outsider art, anonymous art has not had an extensive market and holds no major institutions or specialized press. This may seem surprising, given the flexibility and openness of the contemporary art institution to new practices and artistic fields. But anonymous art hints at the extent to which the idea of authorship still remains the central pillar of modern and contemporary art, and how this idea continues to be reflected in institutional values. The absence of an identified creator, whatever her or his intentions and scopes, is not something that is easily incorporated into the contemporary institution of art, despite the great internal reconfigurations that have taken place during the last century.

The anonymous work of art in the digital age
The circulation and reproduction of a work of art is subject to what Walter Benjamin has coined cultvalue (Kultwert) and exhibition-value (Ausstellungswert). 16 It is by no means granted that in digital and contemporary culture the cult-value and the "aura" of the work have dissipated, as Benjamin had anticipated. Yet, the way in which works of art are exhibited and juxtaposed against modern techniques of reproduction has exerted a deep influence upon how they are received; this is something that has become a focal point for art historiography as well, notably in the work of André Marlaux and Aby Warburg. 17 In the multiplicity of current cultural layers, the exhibition-value of the artworks is significantly convoluted. In the case of anonymous art, this widens the possibilities for its reception. Anonymous artworks may partake in established aesthetic values, based on formal, technical, and broadly cultural attributes, which can be found in objective or subjective approaches. Nevertheless, this set of values may be applied with less contextual information, and, compared with eponymous works, within more random patterns, that depend upon the variable forms of exhibition. In this manner, they seem to initiate unexpected cultural significations and uses. For example, an object like the one portrayed in Figure 5 can yield very different interpretations according to how it is displayed, the amount of information known about it, or even the actual artworks/objects exhibited nearby. So, there is a wide range of possible interpretations: for instance, it could be seen as an original artwork per se, an eccentric object like those exhibited in Kunstkammern (cabinets of curiosities), or an artefact from folk art. The degree of autonomy of the anonymous work of art is significantly weaker than that of eponymous works of art, since it has no stable context of creation. Thus, anonymous works of art are more dependent on the actual context of exhibition and hence they demonstrate a variable potential for "exhibition-value".
This appears to be further accentuated by the heteroclite representations of current communication and metropolitan life. If anonymous art, as argued above, has indeed the ability to enhance the objecthood of the artwork, then it should normally have to confront the constant reiteration of art objects, whose sociality and agency through cultural and communicative channels is already highly complex in itself, involving several personal and cultural projections. 18 It is highly possible that anonymous artworks are invested with feelings, ideas, and experiences in a more random way than eponymous artworks whose provenance and itineraries are more closely recorded. An anonymous artwork is thus even more subject to affects and resonances of the individual spectator or of the collector, who is at greater liberty to situate it among personal cultural and aesthetical interlinkages.
In other words, the well-known catchphrase of Duchamp, "it is the spectator that makes the painting", here acquires a more immediate meaning. In the contemporary art institution, the spectator is usually confronted with an object made by an artist as an artwork, and she or he must investigate its artistic value, a process that is normally framed within institutional expectations, discourses, and debates. In the case of anonymous art, this framing of institutional expectations is no longer fully at work, since the absence of the artist has left this object with virtually no formal institutional acceptance, empowering aesthetic and cultural interlinkages from personal experiences and preferences. So, anonymous art has stronger potential in the digital era exactly because it retains all of these possible nuances of taxonomy and use: it hints at a state of more "customized" aesthetic experiences, so to speak.
It is also quite possible that anonymous art can benefit today from what Alois Riegl described when discussing the cultural heritage of monuments as agevalue. 19 Age-value is not historical or cultural value, it merely points to the "oldness" of the artwork. Accordingly, Riegl insisted that age-value is something than can be directly recognized. It does not require scholarly or aesthetic knowledge to be appreciated. For that reason, Riegl also argued that it is a value that tends towards democratization and may hold special importance in the modern period. 20 In contrast to architectural monuments, the age-value in visual arts may be greatly overshadowed by the aesthetic, historical, and cultural value of an established, i.e. eponymous, artwork. However, age-value can become a significant feature of anonymous artworks. This would not be, of course, the long-term age-value of architecture. A closer example of age-value in contemporary culture would be the appeal of vintage products that have infiltrated, in various cases, contemporary consumption. A vintage product can be considered attractive for various reasons: aesthetics, cultural preferences, and nostalgia may all be in play, which confer on it a direct age-value. In the same manner, an older anonymous work of art may have a certain value as a vintage object, which may possibly overshadow its purely aesthetic value. This also creates a unique phenomenon in visual art, since the age-value could actually attain a primacy over the aesthetic value.
In any case, it becomes evident that anonymous art depends upon collecting practices, and even on the starting principles of every collection, which may vary significantly. In general, art collections are based on criteria that have to do with aesthetics, medium, place, and time. All these criteria may be combined, or one may be more dominant; for example, a collection may host national or local artists without emphasizing aesthetic qualities. These practices indeed form the main conception of an art collection, although the economic prospects of the works themselves may also be an important factor, especially in contemporary art where price speculation is more evident. However, these criteria are not mandatory for the collector of anonymous art, since such a collector may construct more freely a collection made of heterogeneous and seemingly incompatible artworks. Art history, locality, and authorship could, in this case, play a minor role. In this manner, the collecting practices of anonymous art may become highly original, since the collector has more or less the same liberty as the artist to construct an artistic environment without being restricted by the provenance of the artworks.
One might argue that anonymous art further points towards older collecting standards, wherein anonymity was not regarded as a major issue. For instance, cabinet curiosities and some modern collections, such as the one by John Soane (now the John Soane Museum in London), have incorporated curiosities, antiquities, and natural artefacts, along with work of arts. Horst Bredekamp has suggested that these collecting practices are akin to cultural and technological trends of the contemporary era, dominated by images and where the boundaries between technique, art, and nature become more and more blurred. 21 In this respect, anonymous art is not to be considered a new challenge or an alternative framework for institutionalization; it is also possible that anonymous art can develop within a more comprehensive collecting practice that can prove apt in providing additional space for the individual and the aforementioned "customized" aesthetic approaches. The incorporation of the "age-value" into cultural and even consumer practices provides an important hint in this direction.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Konstantinos Vassiliou holds a doctorate diploma from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is currently Adjunct Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Western Macedonia. His research interests are the theory of art, aesthetics, and digital culture. He is the author of two books in Greek, Towards the Technology of Art