In the past two decades the art project - in lieu of the work of art - has without question moved to centre stage in the art world’s attention. Each art project may presuppose the formulation of a specific aim and of a strategy designed to achieve this aim, but this target is mostly formulated in such a way that we are denied the criteria which would allow us to ascertain whether the project’s aim has or has not been achieved, whether excessive time is required to reach its goal or even if the target as such is intrinsically unattainable. Our attention is thereby shifted away from the production of a work (including a work of art) onto life in the art project; life that is not primarily a productive process, that is not tailored to developing a product, that is not ‘result oriented’. In these terms, art is no longer understood as the production of works of art; but as documentation of life-in-the-project, regardless of the outcome the life in question has or it supposed to have had. This clearly has an effect on the way art is now defined. Nowadays art is no longer manifested as another, new object for contemplation that has been produced by the artist, but as another, heterogeneous time-frame of the art project, which is documented as such.

-- EXCERPT FROM "THE LONELINESS OF THE PROJECT" BY BORIS GROYS