Omsorgsfuld kunstanalyse

This article examines how contemporary art’s increasing blurring of the boundaries between the aesthetic and the socio-political fi eld, and the inscription of art’s capacity for reflexive transformation (Rebentisch 2015) of non-aesthetic space as its raison d’être, puts pressure on the analytical practices developed in the 20th century to understand and give meaning to art. Today, the very demarcation of an analytical “object,” an analytical “subject,” and an analytical “situation” in which they meet is, more than ever, a crucial part of the work of art analysis itself. We argue that, if we as researchers are to continue to substantiate and articulate the relevance of contemporary art, we must develop analytical practices that capture its potential reflexive transformation without reducing the complexity of either the analytical object, the analytical subject, or the analytic situation. Inspired by the work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) and Michelle Murphy (2015) in formulating care as an epistemic strategy that is not opposed to conducting critical analysis but rather constitutes an integral part of “staying with the trouble” of analysis (Haraway 2010), we argue that contemporary art calls for a form of caring art analysis. We suggest practicing caring art analysis through multidimensional constellations (Benjamin 1977; 1999) that emerge through a series of analytical coordinates. In this article, we apply this tentative framework to two works of art from the exhibition RECAST, which was shown at Copenhagen University Library in the fall of 2025.