This exhibition reflects an anxiety about the future of art institutions in the absence of a coherent, institutionally validated discourse of the unity of the concept of art. Without it, they may begin to lose their ability to legitimate themselves as art institutions, leading to their delegitimation and the end of their funding.

After new practises radically expanded the concept of art, artistic significance came to depend increasingly not only upon the individuality of the artwork, but also upon the institutional actualisation of a general concept of art, as a context through which the individual work can be presented and given historical significance. An art institution needs a concept of art, and every concept requires unity.

The works on display project the next century - 3019 - as a time when this delegitimation crisis had reached its inevitable conclusion, envisaging the demise of art institutions as resulting from natural disaster - the reduction of historical objects and processes to natural events and things.