It’s nice that in times of great crises there is at least one tiny good crisis: the crisis of art criticism. That was roughly the starting point of the highly ambitious five-day conference “The Future of Criticism” that art historian Angela Lammert and author Kolja Reichert have just organized at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and the Berlin Academy of Arts.
In this future everyone is therefore a critic, no longer just the gatekeepers and critic popes of the “old media”. The new criticism is democratic, polyphonic, diverse. Nevertheless, the celebration of “post criticism” was restrained. Not only because the popes were actually already dead before their successors could have murdered them. Also because it is so unclear how and where their work can be replaced. “A tweet can say as much about a book as a classic review,” said literary scholar Berit Glanz. It’s easy to proclaim that, but one would have liked to see it demonstrated. And so the old complaint about the bad fees is justified legacy media, you can usually still make more money there than with a podcast or on YouTube.
However, there is no doubt that the structure of art, criticism and the public has changed permanently. The earlier public has differentiated itself into “style communities”, the old sender-receiver relationships have given way to communication networks in which everyone can talk to everyone else in variable roles. However, it was by no means just the rise of Web 2.0 that provoked the redefinition of criticism; it is also the “resounding success” of art itself, according to the art historian Robert Kudielka. The task of the critic is not “to ask: What is that?, but: Is there something?” But if it is the artist’s prices and prominence that define the value of art, then the critic is less and less needed to answer this question.
Something else has changed, especially in art and theatre. For decades, audiences have been accused by artists of being oversaturated, bourgeois, and passive, a diagnosis they secretly shared. People went to the theatre, saw contemporary art, only to be startled, provoked and overwhelmed with relish.
Today, the audience is no longer provoked, but invited to participate
Today, however, the public is invited to a “community of values” instead of to a challenging aesthetic event, as Hanno Rauterberg, art critic of the Time, formulated. The viewer becomes a collaborator who should intervene as a co-artist in a spirit of inclusion and empathy. The question of art is increasingly being pushed into the background: “Make friends, not art” was the motto at this year’s Documenta.
The fact that the harmony at the Documenta lasted only three days – until Taring Padi’s banner caused it to explode – was, for Rauterberg, also due to a relapse into the earlier, confrontational relationship between art and the public. If Taring Padi had stayed true to the Documenta ideal of mutual understanding and acceptance, if they had self-critically presented their banner as historical evidence of their own prejudices, the scandal might not have happened.
Rauterberg welcomes the new spirit in art. He brought up a number of long-neglected questions: from the dominance of white men to looted art in museums. He sees “with some shame” that it wasn’t criticism but art that initiated this change. The tendencies towards self-affirmation and the encapsulation of communities are problematic in the new development. But there is no need to worry about the criticism. Your job is to play the troublemaker, prick the bubbles like art used to do.
The most moving moment of the Berlin part of the conference, which had started in Bonn, was the panel with Danson Kahyana from Uganda, Sara Nabil from Afghanistan and Bariş Seyitvan from Turkey, who reported on torture, violence and professional bans. Thanks to the Artists at Risk initiative, they are now safe in the west. But many of their colleagues are still in mortal danger. The possibly life-saving aid with humanitarian visas by Germany and the EU is not making any progress. The guests didn’t get much more than sympathetic applause and a regretful shrug.
At least the artist and researcher Hito Steyerl brought it up again. The organizers had cleverly given her the finals on Saturday night, and she used this slot for an apocalyptic appeal with which she turned the conference upside down. So Hito Steyerl as follows: You talk about post criticism, but platforms like Twitter, on which it takes place, are collapsing with a bang. You talk about art, but as interest rates rise, the liquidity that art has financed over the past 20 years will also disappear. You’re talking about the network, but the energy crisis will still bring us blackouts like today in Kyiv and Cherson. Steyerl’s conclusion: “we must prepare ourselves for a future without energy, without the Internet, without infrastructure!” – and possibly without art, as in Afghanistan.