Death of an Art Critic / Tod einer Kritikerin

“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 pointer finger. But even that image is founded in a misunderstanding: the caricaturesque exaggeration of the critic’s voice as dictatorial. But it’s really nothing more than that very voice. And it pronounces 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 nothing more than the task of pointing at something. […] Whoever just leaves it at that has also parted ways with any hope of open rivalry between arguments.” —Annika Bender

This 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. To make the criticism she proposed possible, and make public its conditions and inherent contradictions—as well as articulate the reasons for her disappearance—it proved necessary to confer Bender to the archive.

Schriftenreihe by Kunsthalle Bern, ed. Valérie Knoll and Hannes Loichinger