The Fire Online — KIRAC’s criticism of the Stedelijk Museum

At some point last year, in a tempestuous column, I wrote that baby boomers’ children and grandchildren — including me — are expected to participate in somebody else’s old age. I mused that baby boomers, roughly 1945–1968, can no longer cope with people like they themselves may once have been: ambitious and contrary. That if you do manage to get past their disapproval, there is always still that vague, weaselly question of whether they like you enough to give you a chance, as though they own the world, as though it is theirs to give away.

That they write in newspapers that young politicians have “dangerous opinions” and things like that. Even when those politicians are already in their mid-thirties. Even when they themselves vote for the lethally dangerous GroenLinks. I wrote: “[…] No new facts or voices may be added; you already decided all that forty years ago. […] Yes, you have kept the peace all this time, but now you also want to saddle our generation in advance with the guilt of losing that peace. Your circle will then be complete; ours remains out of reach.”

Something else occurs to me now. Baby boomers have discount cards for everything: the Keukenhof, concert halls and the Hortus Botanicus, which they reach by taxi or first-class train. A discount for “a lifetime’s work”, because now it is time to “enjoy”. Too sweeping, some said of that column. Yes, that is exactly what a baby boomer would say, of course. Just for them, I’ll put it in quotation marks.

The “baby boomers” in Time’s Up, episode 15 of the film-art project by art-critic duo Stefan Ruitenbeek and Kate Sinha, KIRAC, are NRC journalist Joyce Roodnat, architect Rem Koolhaas, the dutiful offspring in the shape of Stedelijk curator Margriet Schavemaker, and all the other people who automatically spring to mind when the cast describes how “Libelle and NRC blend seamlessly into one another”. After the screening, there in De Balie sits Rutger Pontzen too, editor and art critic at de Volkskrant, and a moderator dressed as a moderator who is trying very hard to understand it all — naturally in such a way that, even in a room full of young people, “the baby boomer” Always Remains the Norm. Because that is how we do things in the Netherlands. “Should you really want all this, a KIRAC like that?” That level.

The screening of Time’s Up, about an overcrowded exhibition drawn from a permanent collection, was actually supposed to take place at the Stedelijk Museum itself. In the film we hear the cancellation phone calls between Ruitenbeek and Schavemaker, who talks poshly about her white privilege the way saleswomen at de Bijenkorf talk about a new makeup line. She reels off the line that KIRAC makes her feel “very unsafe” and takes other escape routes picked up on a correspondence course in identity politics, or from other gatekeepers who liberally employ methods of manipulation of diabolical manufacture. But, for the moment, Schavemaker is saved from the KIRAC critics at the gates. Gates down.

De Balie’s website offers a shorter summary: “Now that the film is finished, the Stedelijk Museum has decided not to screen it. The reason is that KIRAC’s criticism offered no new insights.”

Schavemaker — blazer, white trainers, nice and casual — confirms this in her column after the film. Let me translate the spirit in the room into different words: even “new insights” have to meet guidelines laid down by the institutional gatekeepers, who permit no new insight at all but have incorporated the entire idea of “insights” into maintaining consensus and uniformity. She livens it up with some forceful English phrases. The young audience is supposed to learn from this that, since the discovery and awareness of “white privilege”, new insights have become easier to dodge! And that your opponent cannot get a word in edgeways without being labelled a racist.

As far as Schavemaker and de Volkskrant’s art editors are concerned, insights into art, the state of our society and our individuality within it are now placed on the same level as the unquestionable insularity of the cultural institutions themselves, where just a few people decide what is “of value”. And what counts as “criticism”.

That is why people like Schavemaker and Koolhaas are so obsessively occupied with “attacking established ideas”, about “masochism”, for example: precisely because they do not do it, cannot do it, are not allowed to do it. Kate can explain all of this much better in the film, and the awkwardness during the debate at De Balie confirms it. They make a grand show of clichés, but clichés they remain.

And then there is Joyce Roodnat. With the camera on her, she explains that she actually “wanted to get out of” the interview with Rem Koolhaas at the museum. She did not understand him and could not think of a question. At KIRAC’s kitchen table, she laughs about this confession, which she thinks she can make because it has no consequences. Political correctness, after all, imagines itself unobserved inside closed institutions.

KIRAC does exactly what is needed, in every episode, to make this phenomenon visible. During the debate after the film, Kate Sinha says: “My generation is tired of this sloppiness.” At the end she also goes up to Schavemaker and asks: “But what is sexist about what I’m saying? Come on, give me an argument.” The question is sincere, but it has an enormous gulf to bridge: from the human world to the world of ghosts.

Both Pontzen and Schavemaker act as if KIRAC ridicules people, hurts them unnecessarily and “is irrelevant”, as that below-the-belt phrase goes. The ghosts on stage and in the film are unable to see that “irrelevant” is not a judgment for them to make. “Our” generation searches in vain for a relationship with them. Roodnat hides behind mannerisms and little womanly things, as Ruitenbeek so aptly shows in his feigned compassion for “that sweet little woman”. That is entirely Roodnat’s own doing, not KIRAC’s.

What is entirely KIRAC’s work is the closing scene with the blocked sewer. When he gets home, Ruitenbeek discovers shit coming up through the shower drain. You are treated to images and a description of an incredible stench. This provokes associations: is it a proportionate response, a linking of everything that preceded it to the disgust it arouses, because that disgust cannot exist without obeying the gatekeepers’ rules? It seems as if Kate and Stefan have no outlet for their displeasure other than the smell from their own sewer. That is how impoverished the debate is, the platform for art and cultural criticism, which resembles a conversation with ghosts and is not allowed to bring new insights to life.