The University as a Work of Art

What could explain the remarkable appearance and emergence of artist-led universities in the last couple of decades? Or more to the point: what does the university have that the artists want? My argument in this article is developed on the assumption that certain so-called artist-led university projects elaborate on and problematise something that we might call the university-form: a contradictory social and institutional form pivotal for the reproduction of capitalist societies. In a reading of two of the most compelling artist-led universities from the early 2000s and 2010s, Copenhagen Free University and The Silent University, I will elaborate on how these practices not only dialectically sediment and refuse the historical transformation of the ‘university form’ but also give form to a fundamental crisis or exhaustion of its prevalent grammar of struggle and uni-utopianism, namely the historical semantics and memory of '68. In this way, I suggest considering the two para-institutions as contradictory negating practices exercising a detachment of the university from its own social form.