This panel conversation was initially planned to take place in collaboration with the independent art space Mint, run by Asrin Haidari and Emily Fahlén, in Stockholm. Taking its departure in a planned, open editorial meeting at Mint, the focus of this conversation was the material relationships that art criticism both presupposes and perhaps creates, including populistic notions that criticism meets and inhabits today. By departing from Mint’s investigation of the phenomenon “workers’ art”, historically and today, the meeting will further examine if there exists a workers’ critique, and if so, how it takes shape in contemporary populistic and conservative environments. The focus of the meeting departs from notions such as aesthetic autonomy, labor, and the editorial self-organisation’s history and contemporaneity.
The panel took place online, on 19 April 2020. The panel contributors were, in order of appearance: Michele Masucci, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Kim West and Santiago Mostyn. The panel was moderated by Frida Sandström.
In recent years a great many artists and art institutions have rallied around the defence of ‘artistic freedom’ and ‘free speech’, allegedly imperilled by the moralistic creep of ‘identity politics’ or what is colloquially known as ‘cancel culture’. There is a twofold thread running through all of these controversies: 1) the insistence that far-right idioms, memes and tropes be read as aesthetic material, at a remove from the sphere of the political; 2) the idea that (mostly) white artists appropriating far right imagery subtracts from the far-right surge rather than adding to it.