Seminar by Michael Hirsch on refusal, autonomy, and the longing for radicalism under the title "Service Art and Radical Chic – New Theses on Art and Politics"
Michael Hirsch: "The arts and their institutional and critical state apparatus are an empire of academism and credulity ('Leichtgläubigkeit'). There is an almost unfiltered invasion of the latest ideological trends of the cultural left into the self-description of artists, artworks, and institutions." (Photo: Heiner Conradi)Michael Hirsch: "The dark dialectics between the political economy of culture and political ideas or ideologies for the justification of art has intensified in the last 20 years. A crude doctrine of 'the political' works as main justificatory tool for linking State Bureaucracies, funding agencies, cultural institutions, and criticism on the one hand, overproduction, mass precarity and proletarization of artists and authors on the other." (Photo: Heiner Conradi)Michael Hirsch: "The predominant anti-universalism in the cultural left has always oscillated between harmless and dangerous versions of mislead radicalism and pretentious engagement. Today we are witnessing a comeback of certain features of the early 70s. The anti-imperialist movements have invented the terms 'Global South' and 'Post-Colonialism' as their new anti-universalist kitsch flag, fueled mainly by unpolitical guilt feelings of the ruling enlightened bourgeoisie." (Photo: Heiner Conradi)Andrzej Steinbach and Michael Hirsch (Photo: Heiner Conradi)Michael Hirsch: "The left has given the right subversion as a gift. We are witnessing a new authentic anti-universalist and anti-modernist cultural revolt of the right – much stronger than the cultural left, creating far more powerful affects of identity and enmity." (Photo: Elena Conradi)Michael Hirsch: "A way out of this constellation might be a reconsideration of both the autonomy of art, and the specificity of the concept of politics – a critique of its overstretching in contemporary discourse." (Photo: Elena Conradi)Johnny Leya, Michael Hirsch, and Catherine Gillet (Photo: Heiner Conradi)Magdalena Frauenberg and Leon Philipp (Photo: Elena Conradi)back
