de Volkskrant — Wherever these art critics enter, knees start knocking

The razor-sharp bluntness of Keeping It Real Art Critics

KIRAC’s confrontational short films about art are a YouTube hit. De Volkskrant examines the makers’ motives and methods with them.

By Haro Kraak · 31 January 2018, 19:30

In March 2016, Stefan Ruitenbeek and his girlfriend Kate Sinha are at home in the Bijlmer, talking about the work of Saskia Noor van Imhoff, a celebrated young artist whose work is on show at Amsterdam art centre De Appel. Ruitenbeek, 35, and Sinha, 28, are, in short, rather critical of the works. It is not the first time they have shared an irritation about contemporary art, but this time they decide to do something about it.

“Come on,” says Ruitenbeek. “Let’s go to the exhibition and take the camera.”

In the short film Indignation at De Appel, Sinha says the work makes her feel “a little nauseous”. Why, Ruitenbeek asks, amused. She points to a small copper-coloured block resting on a corner of an installation of metal tubes. “You have to imagine the artist sitting down like this and placing that little block very neatly.”

“Why is that annoying?” asks Ruitenbeek, now even more amused. Sinha: “Because you just want to kick it off.”

The pair then looks at another work. Little clouds of water vapour come out of a chrome tube. Slightly to its left, in a hole in the floor, lies something resembling a dried-out fruit the size of a football. Ruitenbeek: “The ideology annoys me. […] The idea that the subject of art becomes conservation. With a humidifying tube like that.”

A shock wave through the art world

In another room are five stacks of large sheets of brightly coloured paper. “What do you think this is about?” asks Ruitenbeek. Sinha: “About wanting to become an artist and going to Vlieger, a paper shop here in Amsterdam. You smell the paper and feel it and look at it, and that gives you the feeling: yes, I’m an artist.”

A little later, about the same work: “Actually, the artist has no idea what to do, so she just starts stacking things. They are little piles providing proof that she knows what modernism is. She has shown that she dutifully did her homework.”

When this video, now viewed 13,000 times, appeared out of nowhere on YouTube in June 2016 under the name Keeping It Real Art Critics, KIRAC, a modest shock wave passed through the art world. The episode spread “like wildfire through inboxes in the arts”, wrote De Groene Amsterdammer.

Merciless criticism

Such merciless criticism was unusual. “Too mean and too easy,” artist Jan Hoek wrote about the video on Vice. He did think it was good for De Appel, whose subsidy has since been withdrawn, to be taken to task, because the centre mainly showed “art about art”, “the kind of art the outside world doesn’t understand and the art world loves so much”.

“Some people were very indignant about how disrespectfully we treated that art,” says Sinha during an interview in the Bijlmer, where she lives with Ruitenbeek. “My mother also said: surely that’s not how I brought you up? But I don’t think it’s disrespectful. I don’t think about the artist at all when I stand there criticising it.”

Since then, eleven KIRAC episodes have been made — the eleventh appeared on Sunday and the next goes online on Thursday, 8 February — with the help of a €41,000 grant from the Mondriaan Fund. KIRAC, which won the encouragement award of the Prize for Young Art Criticism, received the money to reflect, in a series of videos, on the “socioeconomic context in which artists operate today, and how this is expressed in the art they make”.

A teasing atmosphere

KIRAC also receives advice from art consultancy Paul van Esch & Partners. When he watched the video about De Appel, Paul van Esch immediately contacted Ruitenbeek and Sinha. “That theory about the Vlieger paper shop is an assumption, of course, but I thought it was so spot-on.” He praises their erudition, audacity and humour.

In the films, Ruitenbeek and Sinha — he an artist and Rietveld Academie graduate, she an archaeologist — discuss art and culture in a rather unorthodox way: often highly critical and substantive, sometimes downright blunt or rude. The pair is afraid of no one and likes seeking out discomfort. They often visibly enjoy the adrenaline.

One time, Ruitenbeek and Sinha visit an exhibition and cheerfully dissect the works on the spot; another, they ask provocative questions of a gallery owner or expert, often ending in an unpleasant confrontation.

In the voice-over, Ruitenbeek links the videos together with an ironic tone and plenty of reverb on his voice, further reinforcing the teasing atmosphere.

Not journalism

Journalistic ethics do not trouble them. In the video Not This Way, for instance, they tear apart the idea for a feature film before a single minute has been shot. A friend tells Ruitenbeek and Sinha that black teenage girls are being scouted for the film at the Kwaku Festival in the Bijlmer. “A disgusting subsidy idea,” Ruitenbeek calls it. When their friend phones the filmmaker, she lies about the fact that the conversation is being recorded.

Ruitenbeek does not regret that method. “Without lying, we would never have got them to talk. An important part of a work is created in the run-up to it. Subsidies are applied for, for example. So you absolutely can discuss that.” Besides, he says, KIRAC is not journalism.

Many KIRAC videos take issue with what they see as unsuccessful examples of contemporary or modernist art. “You walk into an exhibition,” says Sinha, “you want to be stimulated, and then you see the complete lack of joy in life in a work like that. You also imagine all those people looking at the work and thinking or feeling absolutely nothing.”

Widely watched

“There is a kind of awkwardness at exhibitions that you also see at agnostic funerals,” Ruitenbeek adds. “Because they lack meaningful rituals and symbols, nobody knows how to behave. Art has been putting that same awkwardness on a religious pedestal for years. Almost every exhibition questions the nature of art: what is art? But why should it be profound constantly to ask yourself about an object’s status? That is a very vain, hollow question.”

The videos attract a fair number of views, around 10,000 to 20,000, with peaks of 56,000. They usually last between ten and twenty minutes, but Ruitenbeek and Sinha also made an hour-long documentary about art dealer Stefan Simchowitz, a controversial figure from Los Angeles whom The New York Times described as “the art world’s patron satan”.

One of the most characteristic KIRAC videos is The Tears of Mara McCarthy, filmed at Frieze London Art Fair. Ruitenbeek, Sinha and their friend, artist Tarik Sadouma, ambush gallery owner Mara McCarthy with a running camera and a barrage of questions about several entirely black-painted canvases by artist Wally Hedrick.

Backed into a corner

“Why is it black?” asks Sadouma. Because, McCarthy explains, the works were painted in the 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam War. In the voice-over, Sadouma argues that this protest is risk-free and simplistic. The point of this sort of left-wing art is not really to think about war at all, he claims. “It’s about the need to be on the right side of history.”

A little later, when she talks about an artist friend who has Parkinson’s, McCarthy begins to cry. Out of sympathy, she says herself. But the viewer cannot escape the impression that the tears also result from the confrontation: the group has literally backed the gallery owner into a corner of her gallery. Eventually, the organisers remove the group from the premises, a development dwelt on at length in the video.

It is uncomfortable to watch, the approach borders on intimidation, and the criticism could be called populist. At the same time, it is raw moments like these that give the films their irresistible “I can’t stop watching” quality. Not for nothing do some call KIRAC “the PowNews of the arts”, although KIRAC is more substantive and more pretentious.

Debate

KIRAC’s tone and approach stand out in today’s art world, where harsh criticism is scarce. Online art criticism consists mainly of blogs, vlogs and Instagram accounts celebrating and glorifying art. The only more or less related initiative is VPRO’s web-video series De Snijtafel, in which Kasper C. Jansen discusses songs, television programmes and films, among other things, with a range of guests.

The print press does publish critical reviews, but on television art is rarely discussed critically or at length. Programmes such as De Wereld Draait Door, Krabbé zoekt Van Gogh and Volle Zalen usually revolve around questions like: why is this art good, how was the work made, and why is the artist interesting?

“There aren’t many people in the arts who feel the need to fight over art,” says Sinha. She describes the philosophy behind KIRAC as follows: “We misuse the Enlightenment ideal of dialectics. We want to enter into debate, preferably with formidable opponents, in order to arrive at a new truth. In practice, unfortunately, it often turns out differently. That is why it is an ideal.”

Knocking knees

In a recent episode, in the middle of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Sinha wants to debate Mondrian expert Hans Janssen. At one of the first critical remarks — that Mondrian might be rigid — Janssen already loses his temper. “Nonsense!” he says, striding towards another painting. “Is this rigid?” he asks, raising his voice. It has become one of their least substantive videos, because the confrontation takes up all the room.

Does this method also work to their disadvantage? Sinha: “I don’t see that confrontational approach as a choice, but as a consequence of our desire to investigate certain things. Other people find that confrontational, and I see that as an interesting fact.”

When Ruitenbeek and Sinha now walk into an art gathering, people’s “little knees start knocking”, says artist Jan Hoek, who has followed KIRAC from the beginning. “They are unbearable sometimes, but they do stir things up. They puncture the bubble in which everyone agrees with everyone else.”

Perhaps also telling about that bubble: all the artists, experts and institutions discussed in the videos and approached for this article — Saskia Noor van Imhoff, Hans Janssen, Renzo Martens, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and the Stedelijk Museum — declined to comment.

“You meet resistance when you speak about art freely,” says Ruitenbeek. “So not from the starting point: oh, how beautiful this art is. Not from the artist’s intention, which you read on the label next to the work.”

“And then it looks as if that resistance, that clash, is our aim, but we really want a conversation,” says Sinha. “Just without that deference towards the artwork or the expert.”

Neutkens

After many critical videos, Ruitenbeek and Sinha are working on a KIRAC episode explaining why they like artist Wout Neutkens’s work so much. The accompanying photograph shows Ruitenbeek and Sinha with one of his sculptures made of cardboard and fabric. Ruitenbeek, who regularly deals in art, has bought several works by Neutkens. He sees no problem in KIRAC making a positive video about them. “I don’t have to be independent. Nobody in art is. As long as I’m sovereign.”