HardHoofd — KIRAC is lagging behind John de Mol

By Julius Koetsier. 5 November 2021.

Enough people have already discussed KIRAC’s bullying, which is supposed to pass for daring art criticism. What Julius Koetsier sees above all is how much these artists still have to learn from truly controversial figures in popular culture.

KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics), the vlogging collective led by Stefan Ruitenbeek, is in the news because of its film Honey Pot. In it, Sid Lukkassen has a sex date with ‘left-wing UvA girl’ Jini Jane. Enough has been said about the ethics of this production; I want to take a look at KIRAC’s artistic quality.

Until recently, their best-known video was The Tears of Mara McCarthy from 2016, in which gallery owner McCarthy is approached by KIRAC collaborator Tarik Sadouma. He bombards her with critical questions until she cries — or so the KIRAC crew believe, and so almost every journalist who discussed the video wrote, from Wierd Duk to Roos van der Lint.

Anyone who watches the video can see that it happens differently. Sadouma plonks himself down and starts making blunt remarks to McCarthy, who first laughs in some surprise and then answers his questions about the art in her gallery. When she shows a video by an artist she knows personally, who has Parkinson’s, she starts crying. Sadouma tries to contribute to her emotional state with a harsh joke about Parkinson’s (‘It’s like a dance, right, shake it, boogie’). McCarthy, however, interprets the joke as a remark about the work, in which the artist crawls through water (‘She does, you see her kind of integrate it’). We are then shown an afterword in which Sadouma triumphantly claims the tears as his victory. Strangely enough, KIRAC managed to convince friend and foe that they had made McCarthy cry — despite the fact that the video unequivocally shows something else.

Most KIRAC vlogs are even less sensational, consisting of little more than conversations about art. I watched the videos with mounting astonishment, wondering why these entirely unambiguous, self-affirming vlogs apparently enjoy a reputation in the art scene for pushing boundaries. ‘Anything but boring,’ says Renee Schuiten-Kniepstra on an episode of the radio programme Kunststof. Anything but boring? Perhaps she finds watching a black screen with white lettering for two minutes terribly exciting, but a statement like that makes me wonder: has she ever heard of John de Mol?

Why are KIRAC’s intellectual masturbation sessions considered disruptive, controversial art, while De Mol’s work — from Big Brother to his magnum opus De Gouden Kooi to the recent De Dansmarathon — actually provokes widespread debate?

Or take Ewout Genemans, who followed people searching for their first sexual experience for his reality programme Ik Heb HET Nog Nooit Gedaan. He had virgins and their potential partners re-enact their successful or unsuccessful dates and attempts at seduction for the camera. In ways that are sometimes alienating and always sophisticated, he plays with reality and fiction. Once you have seen that, are you still impressed by Honey Pot?

The only reason KIRAC’s lazy provocations are regarded as art, while the far more controversial — and stylistically superior — works of De Mol and Genemans are ignored by art critics, is the fictitious distinction between high and low culture. If art critics paid more attention to popular culture, they would see that KIRAC is lagging behind.

Image by Jerry Zhang via Unsplash.

Julius Koetsier is a columnist, film critic, translator, video editor and occasionally something else.