The future director of the Stedelijk Museum

20 October 2017

Beatrix Ruf steps down. Wisely, elusively and silently, she leaves in her black robe, back into the night. As so often happens with corruption scandals, people applaud the departure of the rotten apple, assuming that the rot will leave with her. Now that it has been clearly demonstrated — financially, that is — that she was not acting solely in the Stedelijk’s interests, an image emerges of Beatrix Ruf as an isolated case of corruption, and her departure is greeted with relief, as though the Stedelijk had thereby been saved. That this is utterly complacent wishful thinking is apparent from the fact that the museum’s evident artistic corruption never provided a reason to remove Beatrix Ruf from her position. The greatest threat to the museum is not so much this corruption scandal as the perverse ideological dynamic underlying it: a dynamic that ultimately amounts to a complete lack of interest in art and, as such, has led to a whole series of inadequate decisions in the cultural sector, beginning with Beatrix Ruf’s appointment as director of the Stedelijk Museum.

Anyone reading the articles cannot escape the impression that Beatrix Ruf now has to leave for precisely the same reasons she was hired. The idea was that she would take the Stedelijk into the future: a future in which the museum occupied a powerful position in an expanding art market precisely by participating in it. She would guide the museum through that landscape as an experienced guide, and the inevitable emergence of a grey area between her interests and the museum’s was given, in advance, the flavour of a refined exotic fruit that people dared to taste cautiously. The decision expressed satisfaction that the museum was now finally bidding farewell to its provincial eccentricity and the accompanying naïve, anachronistic ideas about artistic integrity. It was time to embrace the beauty of the market, and that in itself was an artistic, tasteful move, with an aesthetic sensibility all its own. The young artists in Ruf’s circle — Seth Price, Jana Euler, Jon Rafman, Jordan Wolfson, Ed Atkins, Avery Singer — share less an artistic conviction than an aura of gothic, left-wing, socially engaged indifference: the kind of coolness, in other words, that can appeal to you only if you know fuck-all about art but would very much like something from it. The pinnacle was surely the Zanele Muholi exhibition, where visitors were expected to take an interest in the lazy concoctions of a spoilt slut simply because she comes from South Africa and is lesbian and black.

Meanwhile, Bas Heijne tries to rescue his left-wing engagement from a burning church by cutting Ruf’s and the art world’s engagement loose from pure, good engagement, as though Ruf’s decadent version were not an expression of the inherently corrupting nature of left-wing ideology but, on the contrary, a mask stolen by the right and pulled over that raging cesspit of corrupt ugliness to soften the sight a little.

But the reason left-wing engagement corrupts art is not that it is badly executed, but that it can only be badly executed. Ideals are part of life, and as such art can be about ideals. But as soon as art is subjected to ideals, as is by definition the case with socially engaged art, it is given the greatest possible handicap: it may no longer be about the world as it is, but must concern the world as it ought to be, while it remains unclear whether it could ever be that way and whether it would actually be better. The ideal, itself the flattest and most complacent form of desire because it has to satisfy no requirement except being ‘ideal’, becomes an unpleasant burden. Meanwhile, the awareness that the ideal does not improve the world but merely lies on top of it like a flat pancake leads to alienation, which can be remedied only with a healthy dose of cynicism — Ruf — or an unhealthy dose of optimism. Neither is recommended.

Heijne’s misconception suggests that the Stedelijk would improve if it now appointed an honest, socially engaged left-wing director. Such a choice might well prove the death blow — worth trying in itself! Honest left-wing engagement also reflects on itself and thereby invariably ends up in the kind of cannibalistic academic muttering that always wants to conclude that nothing is possible any more. This is what happened to the De Appel art centre. It is a perverse form of indifference: one stipulates that the sun may shine only if it shines properly, then expresses surprise when everything begins to wither. In that respect, Karin van Gilst’s blockbuster exhibitions are more attractive, if only because Matisse and Picasso embrace life when nobody else will. Especially if that takes enough pressure off to allow experiments with young artists without their immediately having to serve a social purpose or line a director’s pockets. I say: loosen the reins a little and everything will live and flourish again, in art too.

Also published in ThePostOnline: http://cult.tpo.nl/2017/10/22/toekomstige-directeur-stedelijk-museum/