Is contemporary art really art or something else entirely, and, if it is art, then what does that say about art's place in the world? These are some of the most frequent questions and criticisms raised against contemporary art. Such claims testify not only to the often tense relationship between the general audience and contemporary artistic practice, but they also emphasise that contemporary art is once again an 'ivory tower', a hermetic and esoteric enclave that persists despite the history of the twentieth century and the apparent shift from modernism to postmodernism. This persistence of a form of the avant-garde, albeit a debated and controversial one, is not just a theoretical issue within critical discourse but also an important subject matter for contemporary artworks themselves.

It might appear unnecessary, or even incorrect, to raise these questions in our current cultural era. After all, we have seen the transformation of the 'art-piece' into an art 'work' (Roland Barthes), its 'space' changed into a 'site' (Michel Foucault) that is in turn just another fragment of the 'expanded field' (Rosalind Krauss) of our postmodern global culture. Yet, in spite of art being swept up in the multi-media and inter-disciplinary waves of recent discourse, and even because many contemporary artworks look so similar to other cultural products, at some point it is crucial to try to discriminate the artistic medium from the rest of medialand and to find out what still gives art its raison d'être.

If we don't simply rehearse the Marxist position that furiously accuses art of being the product of cynical, commercial, bourgeois, capitalist and power interests, then we will discover that the most interesting and crucial artworks encode