In bourgeois society, art progressively established itself as an autonomous sphere, detached from the praxis of life. With the rise of Aestheticism in the second half of the 19th century, this condition reached an extreme form: art tended towards self-referentiality, ultimately reducing itself to its own content. It was precisely against this separation that the historical avant-gardes intervened. As Peter Bürger argues, their radicalism lay not merely in the pursuit of new artistic languages, but in contesting art as a consecrated institution and challenging its isolation from social life. The movements shaping their trajectory aimed to bridge this divide, fundamentally altering what could be made and recognized as art while unsettling the conventions that had historically dictated its forms, functions, and limits.
Yet that contestation was gradually co-opted. Upon entering history, museums, and the art market, the avant-gardes saw their subversive charge converted into cultural heritage and economic value. Bourgeois culture thus came to absorb the very rupture that had challenged it. In the contemporary system, this process of subsumption moves directly to the level of production: the market no longer simply determines value, but actively shapes form, rewarding immediate recognisability, visibility, and consensus. Artists are thus incentivised to align their practice with systemic demands, catering to those holding economic power. As Isabelle Graw demonstrates, price no longer corresponds to artistic value: the market attributes worth based on reputation and standing, turning the rigor of research into an incidental and often negligible factor.
It is precisely within the tension between what is consecrated and what is excluded that the MA-g historical collection takes shape. Rejecting the hierarchy established by critical and commercial success, the collection does not adopt notoriety as a yardstick, recognizing that an artist's fame captures only a fraction of their relevance. Instead, it turns to print-based media—a realm of avant-garde production where the redefinition of art's boundaries found radical expression. Photography, graphic design, and illustration, long relegated to the margins of recognized artistic languages, here reclaim full epistemological and formal dignity without being detached from their original purpose and medium. The historical collection stems from this conscious choice: not to reconstruct what the art system has already legitomised, but to restore to avant-garde research that dimension of reproducibility and widespread distribution that subsequent hierarchies worked to marginalise.
The contemporary collection does not merely append new works to a closed narrative; it builds an archive in real time as history unfolds. It achieves this through a shared vision with artists, who choose to entrust part of their research to this collective endeavor as an act of intellectual complicity and theoretical engagement, operating beyond market logic. The museum thus becomes a catalyst and a site of debate between diverse perspectives, united by the urge to interrogate the present. This same impetus extends to critical inquiry and cross-disciplinary practice through an ongoing series of talks on philosophy, literature, poetry, and music. In embracing this cross-pollination, the museum reclaims a drive central to the historical avant-gardes themselves, for whom dismantling disciplinary boundaries was bound up with the redefinition of art. Just as print journals served as the space where those movements collectively forged their ideas, this dimension of the museum seeks to keep that function alive, linking production, research, interpretation, and debate.
The MA-g opens inside the underground network because a museum founded on avant-garde radicalism cannot accept the institutional form itself as neutral. The choice of venue directly addresses how the museum engages with society: not as a space built to isolate art and regulate its appreciation, but as a presence embedded within the flow of urban life. The underground is not converted into a museum; rather, the museum installs itself within the underground, without requiring the site to compromise its nature or function. In doing so, the venue calls into question not only what the museum preserves and produces, but the very separation upon which the museum institution was historically founded.
The MA-g does not treat the historical avant-gardes as a closed chapter. It reopens their unresolved questions to test them against the present, where they once again challenge the relationship between necessity and form, production and circulation, individual research and collective construction. The goal is not to preserve a tradition, but to test whether that tension can still yield real consequences. The MA-g exists to keep that possibility open.