In the mid-1960s, the William L. Pereira and Associates studio of architects designed and built the Los Angeles County Museum. Edward Ruscha, who was interested in architectural motifs, made sketches that then helped him create his painting The Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire. According to his own words, Ruscha knew that, “I was going to attack the building in some way”. Endloser Teufels- und Tugendkreis is a new step towards the genesis of the American artist’s work.

The circularity of Endloser Teufels- und Tugendkreis is a progressive and regressive displacement of the principle on which the relationship between creation and the created work and between manufacture and the manufactured work is based; the relationship that connects together object and value. The movement starts with the economic aspect, where the value can be found in the object itself, and moves on to the mercantile aspect, which emphasises the scope, reproduction, quantity and consumption of the object. From there, it moves on to the financial aspect, which inverts the direction of the relationship so that the first element is the value generated by competition between objects in a mercantile context. Contemporary art is part of this trend, albeit with certain peculiarities. It has reached the area of finance, but unlike the stock exchanges, the art exchange is an unregulated market.

The role played by museums in this dimension of contemporary art, in the hands of powerful financial structures, is annihilated and turned into a sellable commercial brand like a franchise in any faraway place of accessible “globally”. For policies on culture and industry, art is an excuse for generating the bureaucratic apparatus of institutions, foundations and associations that act as shippers of labels based on criteria that are more in line with affinities and the exchange of interests than anything else. The value before the object. Profit before substance.

Ruscha attacked the museum by setting fire to it. His explanation was, “what really interested me about the project [the burning museum] was its slanting aerial perspective. It is also important because it reads from the bottom left-hand corner to the top right-hand corner… and, suddenly, there’s that small lateral flame that gives you the sensation that it can enshroud the entire building”. Richard D Marshall interpreted the painter’s attack not as a call to violence, but rather as a formal consideration. Perhaps the way out of this infinite, infernal vicious and at the same time virtuous circle is a violent break away from everyday barbarity.