#4 Re: Risk?

When modern societies discuss the future, it is usually in terms of risk. Economic crises, technological developments, ecological tipping points and geopolitical conflicts are all increasingly described as risks. It is a concept that promises orientation in the face of uncertainty.

As Niklas Luhmann pointed out, risk does not simply mean danger but rather a potential harm that can be attributed to certain decisions. Danger, by contrast, denotes external threats that are not amenable to such attribution. This distinction shifts the perspective: What appears as risk becomes subject to calculation, management and speculation.

In economics, Frank Knight distinguishes between risk and uncertainty. Risk is fundamentally calculable and therefore insurable, while uncertainty cannot be fully translated into probabilities. Modern societies are constantly navigating this tension, attempting to transform uncertainty into calculable risk, while time and again encountering the unforeseeable.

Ulrich Beck turned this into a diagnosis of the present. Modernity produces not only prosperity but also hazardous situations that are self-generated and transgressive: risks that arise from technology, industry or political decisions. Beck speaks of the risk society, in which not only goods but increasingly also detriments, side effects and uncertainties are distributed. Here, it is not merely about the presence of risks but also about what form they take.

This became particularly apparent in the “subprime crisis”, in which mortgage loans were bundled and transformed into increasingly complex financial products. The repackaging of debt served to translate risks into new forms, redistributing them and passing them on until it was almost impossible to discern their origins and gauge their true scope. This reveals a fundamental characteristic of modern societies – namely, that they often produce risks through the very attempt to control them. Risk is therefore not an exceptional state, not the antithesis of order, but rather a central medium of modern-day order.

In the arts, too, the form that risk takes is a central question: art does not set out to minimise uncertainty but seeks rather to generate it and put it on public display. In art, risk presents itself as an experiment under conditions of public exposure.

Artistic practice brings forms into the world whose meaning, value and impact cannot be established for certain in advance. A work may fail, may be misunderstood or appropriated, or it may have no effect at all. This is where its social significance lies. Art interferes with perceptual and interpretive systems with no guarantees as to what will take their place. This risk has been intrinsic to the structure of art since modernism. Works may call into question their own means, their materials, their institutional frameworks, or even their very status as artworks. What is at stake in such moments is not merely an individual work but also the expectation of what can be considered art at all.

Economic risk and artistic risk are therefore two different things. In economics, risk is calculated, distributed and traded. In art, it arises when something is placed in the world while it is simultaneously exposed to public judgement. Art works with contingency without reducing it fully to calculation.

As our conversation with the writer Cécile Wajsbrot makes clear, the risk of art lies not in provocation but in the capacity to endure uncertainty and to resist the simplifications of the present. The composer Christopher Fox focuses on this perspective by showing that the greatest threat to the arts today lies not in risk itself but in its avoidance. Thomas Heise’s film Fabrik 7, with images and sounds from inside the Berlin Volksbühne, ultimately reveals the fragility of the institution: a condition in which history, labour and artistic practice overlap, and in which the future of the theatre as a site of production becomes an open question under today’s austerity mandate.

It is at this point that art and economics intersect in a paradoxical way while remaining fundamentally distinct. Both deal with contingency. While financial markets and technological systems seek to make contingency tradable, the arts create spaces in which uncertainty can be publicly experienced and negotiated.

What does risk mean for the arts today? What risks come about when artists take a public stance, test new forms and submit themselves to public judgement? Perhaps therein lies their social function: not to eliminate uncertainty but to make it something that can be experienced aesthetically as a condition of freedom.

Manos Tsangaris
President of the Akademie der Künste

Anh-Linh Ngo
Vice-President of the Akademie der Künste