From Relevance to Legitimacy
Canon Paper No. 6
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
Institutions change their minds. Curators move on. Museum directors retire. The scholars who championed an artist in one decade are, in the next, replaced by a different generation with different enthusiasms and different blind spots. Given how much of institutional recognition depends on specific people making specific arguments at specific moments, it is worth asking why any artist's position should be expected to survive all of that turnover at all.
Most positions do not. An artist can be genuinely relevant — repeatedly, independently validated, taken seriously by real institutions — and still see that relevance fade once the particular people who built it move on to other things. This is not a failure of the work. It is simply what happens when recognition remains tied to the individuals who granted it, rather than to something more structural.
Gerhard Richter's case shows what it looks like when this does not happen. By the mid-1990s, his work had been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. By the mid-2000s, a dedicated research archive had been established in Dresden, tasked specifically with documentation, scholarship, and the ongoing cataloguing of his work — an institution built to outlast any single curator's tenure. In the years since, the people responsible for interpreting his work at MoMA alone have included at least four different curators and scholars across two separate curatorial generations, each arriving independently at texts and exhibitions that took his significance as a starting point rather than a question still to be settled. Directors have changed. Curatorial staff have entirely turned over. The position has not moved.
This is a different condition from relevance, and it is worth naming precisely. Institutional legitimacy is what relevance becomes once it no longer depends on continued attention from the specific people or institutions that first produced it — once recognition has become distributed and durable enough that new generations of curators, without any obligation to defer to their predecessors, arrive at the same conclusions independently.
The distinction is not a matter of degree, exactly, though it can look that way from the outside. It is closer to a threshold. Relevance can be substantial and still fragile — genuinely earned, and still capable of receding if the small number of people or institutions carrying it move their attention elsewhere. Legitimacy is what exists once that dependency has broken: when the position is no longer being sustained by a specific relationship, but has become, in effect, self-sustaining — reaffirmed by people who never met the artist and never worked with the original champions.
This raises an obvious and important question, one this paper does not want to pass over quietly: how would anyone know the difference before enough time has passed to find out? The honest answer is that legitimacy is easier to confirm in hindsight than to declare in the moment. What can be said with more confidence is what would count as evidence against it — and this matters, because a claim that cannot be disproven by anything is not a serious claim at all. If an artist with a genuinely well-documented, decades-long pattern of independent, multi-institution recognition were to structurally vanish from collections, major exhibitions, and scholarship — not because the whole field shifted around them, but specifically in their case — that would be real evidence that what looked like legitimacy was something more fragile after all. This has not, so far, been observed in any case examined closely enough to test it. That absence is worth stating plainly, and worth not overstating: it is the best evidence available so far, not proof that legitimacy, once reached, can never recede.
It is also worth being clear about what legitimacy does not mean. It does not mean permanence in any absolute sense — institutions can still reassess, historical interpretations do shift, and a position that looks unshakeable can weaken over long enough timeframes for reasons that have nothing to do with any single case failing on its own terms. What legitimacy describes is comparative resilience: a position that has stopped depending on any one relationship, and started depending on the accumulated, independent weight of many.
This also clarifies something the previous paper left open. Durability of embedding — a permanent collection, an archive, a body of independent scholarship — is what makes legitimacy possible. It is not, on its own, the same thing as having achieved it. A single museum acquisition is a durable fact. It is not yet a generational pattern of independent reaffirmation. Legitimacy is what durability becomes once it has been tested by enough time, and enough turnover among the people involved, to show that the position does not belong to any one of them.
Reaching this point is rare — rarer than relevance itself, which is already uncommon enough. What happens to the small number of artists whose work goes further still, becoming not just legitimate within the current institutional generation but historically transmitted across the ones that follow, is a different question again, and a harder one.
