Kate stands for director of the Stedelijk Museum

Kate Sinha explains her candidacy

What would her directorship mean?

Kate Sinha, 25 June 2018

By playing with opinions and theatrically setting them against one another, KIRAC creates a space in which the polarised public debate can once again be viewed from a distance. This is art’s aesthetic potential, which I would place at the centre of my work as artistic director of the Stedelijk Museum.

My approach to art runs counter to the conventions now dominant in the global and local art worlds, which currently hold the museum in an impasse.

Steven ten Thije, a curator at the Van Abbemuseum, is a good example of what currently leads the art world. In KIRAC episode 13, he blames “provocative art” for the fact that “things haven’t become any friendlier over the past twenty years”. He thus sees provocation and openness in art as a cause of the hardening of debate we have witnessed recently, and concludes that art will have to become more cautious.

Apart from the fact that cautious art immediately makes itself redundant because it dares not address anything, I see precisely the opposite relationship: as art has increasingly presented itself in recent years as society’s moral guardian, it has also increasingly turned away from everything it identifies as bad or unwelcome.

For example, in an article in de Volkskrant, former Stedelijk Museum director Beatrix Ruf explains how she uses the museum as a counterweight to “populism”. But she does not stop to consider what that populism consists of, what causes it or who the populists are, nor the fact that her own statements are a form of populist rhetoric. She shows no interest whatsoever in the problem she identifies: it is bad, so it requires no further examination, let alone a place in the museum.

In this way, a completely one-sided picture of what is bad is given every opportunity to confirm itself complacently before an audience that agrees. An audience that disagrees has, after all, long since stopped feeling welcome in the museum and does indeed feel excluded. The enemy is always the other group. The reason I see this in particular as a danger is that I see in it the very core of the polarisation of debate. Only when art — and above all the important cultural institutions representing it — also admits the “bad” sides of society and humanity, and the contradictions of life, into a holistic, realistic and honest perspective on human beings and society can space emerge for an open, less tense dialogue. Art is the arena par excellence in which that dialogue can take place in a civilised, because sublimated, manner. The best art concerns both good and evil and how they intertwine, just as in real life. Art can be realistic in that respect.

As soon as the Stedelijk Museum opens itself to such a conception of art under my leadership, it will immediately gain the freedom to chart an artistic course that is both relevant and original. The challenge lies in offering a truly diverse programme, and that is possible only when it acknowledges society’s actual diversity, as well as art’s aesthetic position in relation to it. Museums, artists and curators worldwide struggle with this issue. The pioneering position the Stedelijk would acquire under my leadership in this way would also give the museum considerable international standing.

Here are two concrete exhibition proposals to give an idea:

A blockbuster show with painter Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall makes wonderful work because he takes both the complexity of his subject, “the black artist”, and his artistic tradition, “painting”, seriously. He thereby genuinely shows the viewer something, instead of wearily and complacently reproducing familiar patterns of thought about racism. His work is enormously successful on the art market and therefore falls under “jet-set” art, which, according to the Amsterdam Arts Council’s recommendations, is of no interest to the Stedelijk Museum. A major retrospective of Kerry James Marshall would not only be a wonderful opportunity to see his best works together; it would also show how good art always transcends the flat categories into which people try to place it — “jet-set” or not, “black” or not. Six years ago, when Kerry’s fame was still modest, it would admittedly have been easier to assemble this show. Now, however, the considerable effort would produce a spectacular blockbuster that would draw everyone in.

Kerry James Marshall, Vignette, 2003. Acrylic on fibreglass. 72 × 108 in; 182.9 × 274.3 cm.

Because blockbuster shows generate large visitor numbers, they also create room to experiment with smaller or controversial exhibitions.

YouTube Arena: An exhibition

Another phenomenon I would like to address is the artistic tradition now developing primarily on YouTube. Films by artists such as Sam Hyde and Tarik Sadouma, as well as our own KIRAC, exemplify vlog-like forms of artistic expression in which the story develops as it is being told to the camera, creating a meaningful relationship between the narrator’s involvement and the unfolding narrative. I would like an exhibition to reflect on the intoxicating, hypnotic, social-realist character of this art form, which seeks to grasp reality by treating reality as theatre. In a sense, Jordan Peterson’s work also belongs here, even though he does not regard himself as an artist. Contextualising it in this way would offer a means of thinking about the meaning of his work and its attraction for people.

Performer and comedian Sam Hyde.