Illiberal Arts

The liberal capitalist world order that prevailed after 1989 is today in a stage of advanced disintegration. The collapse of this order exposes the illiberal core of its freedoms and forms of ownership shaped by the market: the violent unfreedoms of the dispossessed as well as the willingness of the propertied to use violence. Art, too, reveals itself as the venue of these forces and their exclusions: Through the downfall of liberality, the modern institution of “veranstaltlichte Kunst” (“institutionalized art”; Arnold Hauser) and its social legitimacy are also increasingly called into question. Illiberal Arts is a search for forms concerning an artistic “Lebensarbeit” (“life’s work”; Lu Märten, publicist and art critic, 1879–1970) initiated with international artists, poets and authors. In the cracks of the decaying forms of market accumulation, anti-identitarian, communal horizons burst open, as do collective forms of perception and political spontaneities. The project subjects these to a practical test. For Lu Märten, “a person’s whole life’s work” was considered artistic; what was artistic didn’t always have to become art. Perhaps what became art doesn’t necessarily have to remain art either. With contributions by Juliana Spahr; Rosalind C. Morris; Aristilde Paz Justine Kirby;Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; Ana Teixeira Pinto; Simone White; Frank Engster, Lisa Jechske and MYSTI, Jenny Nachtigall, Fumi Okiji,Larne Abse Gogarty, arán Finlayson, Danny Hayward, Em Hedditch, Marina Vishmidt, Danny Hayward a.o.