ANNIKA BENDER

Death of an Art Critic /Tod einer Kritikerin

Valérie Knoll & Hannes Loichinger (Eds.)

This palm-sized book is an adaptation of Annika Bender’s lecture “Jump! You Fuckers!” which was presented at Kunsthalle Bern in the context of a series on overproduction and ambivalence in contemporary art. Annika Bender was one of the pseudonyms of artists Dominic Osterried and Steffen Zillig, who wrote the blog Donnerstag (now discontinued) under her name. Bender explained, “The idea behind Donnerstag was to insist on the difference between good art and bad art. I am aware of how anachronistic that sounds and how quickly it evokes the image of an old critic-pontiff wagging his authoritarian finger. But even that image is misunderstood: the caricaturesque exaggeration of the critic’s voice as dictatorial. It’s really nothing more than that very voice pronouncing a judgment that is not juridical, but ideally worth nothing more than the argument at its core. It’s far more authoritarian and antidemocratic to deny a public voice the act of judgment and concede to a postheroically styled art writer who presents nothing more than the task of pointing at something.”

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