KIRAC Merely Confirms a World We Already Know

Why was I so extravagantly enthusiastic about the artwork Take the Money and Run? It consists of two blank canvases, nothing more. Danish artist Jens Haaning submitted the work after receiving $84,000 from a museum to recreate two older works in which banknotes had been framed. This time, however, the artist kept the money. “The work is that I have pocketed their money,” Haaning later explained on the radio. According to him, it was not theft but a breach of contract, “and breach of contract is part of the work”.

It is such a good artwork, said the person I asked to explain my enthusiasm, because it intervenes in reality. He saw it as a continuation of Duchamp's urinal. That piss pot once demonstrated that what we consider art is a matter of agreement: put something in a museum and people admire it in awe. Every subsequent readymade, however, was lazy and uninteresting in my interlocutor's view: the artificiality of art had already been demonstrated long ago.

Haaning's work, by contrast, or the Banksy painting that went through the shredder, shows the next step: art as an economic product. That shredded Banksy painting recently sold for $24.5 million. Controversy sells, after all, and no painting in recent history has appeared in so many newspapers and television news broadcasts. Anyone who has seen Banksy's film Exit Through the Gift Shop knows how thoroughly the art world is governed by such perverse tendencies.

On the radio, Haaning explained that he would not earn anything from the museum commission. The $84,000 was meant to be framed, while materials and labour were at his own expense. With Take the Money and Run, the artist was therefore issuing a call: “I encourage people whose working conditions are as miserable as mine to do the same. If they have a shit job, earn no money and are effectively being asked to pay to work, take the money and run.”

This is what art should do, my interlocutor continued to declaim: expose ideology! Break through the simulacrum! Free us from the desert of the real!

It reminded me of a friend who once quit his office job because he had read Annelies Verbeke's Sleep! I no longer remember the precise connection between the novel and his resignation, but I do remember exactly where I was standing when he told me. And the enormous impression it made. That art could bring something like that about! Surely every artist must dream of this? That their work does not merely move people, or offer another perspective, or raise more questions than it answers, or any of the other things always said when art's value is discussed, but prompts action.

Since Duchamp, anything can be art as long as it stands within the walls of a museum. But things only become truly interesting when those walls are torn down.

I continued musing about taking money and perverse tendencies, until another artwork suddenly attracted all the attention. The art collective KIRAC turned out to have made a sex film with the far-right philosopher Sid Lukkassen, and had also hoisted artist and rapist Julian Andeweg onto a horse, supposedly to uncancel him. Lukkassen, however, had not consented to the use of his nude footage; a small group of protesters was disgusted by Andeweg on that horse; and Twitter users were falling over one another to express their revulsion. In other words, this was most definitely an intervention in reality and a spur to action. So why was I so much less enthusiastic this time?

Since my interlocutor was absent, I turned to some interviews with KIRAC. The ethical and moral questions in this case — what is and is not permissible? — did not particularly interest me. What I wanted to know was: what is being exposed here? In the interviews, KIRAC's members talked a great deal about wanting to break scripts and be the mirror that shows the emperor without clothes. But a social analysis was missing. When any interpretation was offered, it was psychological rather than ideological: what does this do to me? What does it do to you? Above all, the artists seemed bored with what they called “a culture in decline”, “faded glory” and “a lack of life”.

Because we live in the desert of the real! I could hear my interlocutor shouting in my head.

The problem, or my problem, is simply that KIRAC changes nothing. It merely confirms a world we already know, one in which everything is a performance and creating controversy gives you a reason to exist. KIRAC says that controversy is part of the artwork — because of the mirror and so on — but it amounts to no more than: “Gosh, people get upset when I kick them.” It has been demonstrated hundreds of times before; it is a copy of a copy of a copy. We all know it already.

Occasionally an appealing thought emerged in one of the interviews, and a KIRAC member offered a different perspective. Certainly, more questions were raised than answers given. “Interesting” was undoubtedly the most frequently used word. Meanwhile, though, absolutely no one would quit their job because of KIRAC.