I find this two-way act of exclusion and inclusion to be fitting logic for the art world. To me, the art world appears as an immense flow of artists, curators, critics, ad infinitum who both desire and compete for similar or exact components (e.g., visibility, resources, authority). This rivalry of desires can be understood as a ‘game’ which revolves around who is able to be visible (included) and who is forced to disappear (excluded) from the art world’s transitory stages (visibility understood as self-explanatory, but also what it constitutes together with resources and authority). Inevitably, one needs to perform in this ‘game,’ albeit the rules, interactions and causalities can, at times, be hard to comprehend (at least this is how I feel). In this ‘game,’ exclusion functions as a way for the dominant instances to uphold a fixed language, content and structures of production and representation concerning art (needless to say, the dominant also uphold a set of limits based on class, gender and ethnicity within cultural, geographic and political contexts). At the same time, exclusion also reinforces and intensifies shared beliefs in the valuation of the dominant ideal of art (world), since the instances that have gained authority over the desirable (visibility, resources, authority) have made it even more scarce. In this logic, the two-way act of exclusion and inclusion occurs as there is still the need for the excluded to desire that which is denied from them. In a way, their (useless) desire is still something that validates dominance for others, as they continue to participate in maintaining the dominant ideal of art (world).

Desire is addressed in the cultural critic Rey Chow’s text “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood.” Here she speculates on the conceptual relation between mimesis and sacrifice, and how desire is interlinked between these two. Chow defines the relation between mimesis and sacrifice as “… a double epistemic passage underlying all acts of signification, a passage that tends to become acute in context of dominance and subordination, in which loss and gain are existentially palpable phenomena impinging on individual and group identity formation.” She then brings forth the idea of mimesis as a coping mechanism (Luce Irigaray’s concept of femininity as ‘masquerade,’ whereupon women must imitate or reproduce norms of femininity which have been prescribed in advance by patriarchal mores) and as a survival tactic (Homi Bhabha’s notion of black subjectivity and the need to imitate those who victimize: white subjectivity). She then writes about René Girard’s mimetic theory in relation to the above but also how mimesis, in Girard’s theory, acts as an original force in generating desire. For Girard, desire is something which can be learned, borrowed and transferred. Desire, that is to say, is an outcome of human social interaction, and mimesis is something that activates the act of desiring; it is what gives desire its direction and trajectory as well as its objects. This mimetic nature of desire also generates competition that can accelerate into reciprocal violence. To restrain the rivalry, there is a need for what Girard calls the scapegoat mechanism. Therefore, the scapegoat is a structural and social necessity for a community to stop the endless circle of violence through an act of exclusion. Usually, the randomly chosen victim is sacrificed not because of his qualities (e.g., weak, strong), but because he resembles the community and its endless ability to retaliate: because he is just like us.