If we take seriously the idea that the art worlds are structured by inequalities, where, as Gregory Sholette puts it (after a long series of famous others), cultural capital is unevenly distributed, how does our writing contribute, participate, resist, or redistribute the various forms of power at play? A simple way to start thinking about this is the problem of what or whom to write about. This seems the most direct answer to this question. Choosing to write about an artist or a practice contributes to give it visibility and in a world where visibility is a form of currency, the choice of writing about an artist is already in itself a form of intervention, of redistribution of attention. This inevitably leads to the next question: how to do this responsibly?

This is where the plot thickens. To frame the problem as a mere question of visibility suggests that we can simply turn the spotlight on a different actor to effectuate change. As if this actor was readily available to receive light, awaiting, already fully formed, in the dark. It might very well be that this is insufficient, that making it visible does not make it intelligible or available to experience or thought. In fact, if many practices are not visible, it is because they are not even yet discernable. Their contours remain blurred, they remain confused with a general cultural background. The necessary conditions for them to become visible need to be created in the first place. As a writer, I need to move from the question of what I write about to the conditions that make this “what” a discernible object. In this process, visibility itself needs to be rethought. (For instance, if we apply a hegemonic critical framework, we will not undo the relations of domination/alienation; see unlearning)

For many reasons, visibility might not even be a good thing. Or not unproblematically. It might very well be that a practice can only survive if it remains in the shadows or if it is able to maintain a certain form of ambiguity. The standard conditions of visibility in many contemporary institutions come together with a process of purification, in the Latourian sense, where practices need to abandon their hybridity in order to gain access to a domain. In their work on artification, Roberta Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich document the profound changes experienced by breakdancers, chefs or graffiti artists when their work gains the status of art^[1]1Roberta Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich, “When Is Artification?,” Contemporary Aesthetics Special Volume 4 (January 2012): on line.. In her reflections on the migration of scientific photographs from the file cabinet to the exhibition wall, Rosalind Krauss wrote that the gallery wall becomes a signifier of inclusion with everything excluded from it “becoming marginalized with regard to its status as Art”^[2]2Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal (New York. 1960) 42, no. 4 (1982): 311–19. .

To compose an object then requires to move across all the layers of this problem. To strategically contribute to the general economy of attention, to work on the conditions of discernibility. And be reflexive about the implications of making visible and discernible (maybe discernibility is just another name for the distribution of the sensible extended to a larger set of “sensors”?).