On the Conditions of Politics

A series of discussions held in conjunction with artist Paul Chan’s recent show at the Serpentine Gallery, worth checking out. I haven’t watched all of it, but I highly recommend the discussion between artist Gustav Metzger and Marxist political aesthetician Esther Leslie. Metzger rips apart the media spectacle surrounding (and, he argues, calculated and produced by) Damien Hirst’s life-size platinum and diamond bejeweled cast of a human skull (For the Love of God, 2007), while Leslie pretty much demolishes a lot of recent criticism and scholarship around the ability of contemporary art to provide answers to crucial political questions, arguing rather that most of it moralizes and talks down to viewers rather than engaging and mobilizing audiences. There’s a lot more happening here and it’s well worthwhile.