Tag: Critique

In 1957 the artist Guy Debord, together with other left-wing European intellectuals, founded the Situationist International (S.I.). The movement understood itself as a “revolutionary front within culture”, critiquing the spectacle of the commodity society of the time using the methods of play and the so-called communication guerrilla. In an age in which the principles of the market economy now exercise an even more pervasive influence on life, the exhibition project The Most Dangerous Game at HKW initiates a reassessment of the Situationist critique. In discussion with HKW director Bernd Scherer, the curators Wolfgang Scheppe and Roberto Ohrt explore how the S.I. understood the sublation of art, while its members nevertheless perceived themselves as professional revolutionaries in the field of art, demonstrating intellectual flexibility within this dichotomy. To article in German...

Sometimes words do what they want, and no one knows this better than Herta Müller. For decades the Nobel Laureate for Literature has explored the recalcitrance and permeability of language. In the coming edition of the talk series Dictionary of Now, together with the writer Marcel Beyer, she discusses when language becomes an expression of resistance and when an instrument of the exercise of power. On this occasion, we reproduce here a text from an anthology of the literary magazine Akzente. To article...