For the Big Picture this week, the Critics’ Table enters the fray, taking a close look at Dean Kissick's recent, polarizing cover article for Harper’s. Our guest critic, the artist Ajay Kurian, questions Kissick’s assumptions about marginalized identities and major institutional exhibitions, suggesting that—as art discourse dovetails with anti-woke culture wars and we descend deeper into hell—neither DEI window dressing nor a return to the past will save us.
It was as a student at a Christian boy’s school in Oxford, England, that the critic Dean Kissick was first exposed to the work of Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch. Kissick fondly recalls the documentation of one of Nitsch’s Das Orgien Mysterien Theater (Theater of Orgies and Mystery) performances, describing naked participants in the Austrian countryside “wrapped in white sheets, soaked in the blood of cows they had sacrificed, performing rituals in their commune.” This is how, he explains, he came to understand Modernist transgression. Nitsch’s productions “had nothing to do with personal identity or the imparting of information,” Kissick insists. “They were, rather, attempts to leave social norms and Apollonian rationality behind and to embrace Dionysian chaos.”
As if to transgress conventional art writing decorum, Kissick begins his Harper’s debut, “The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art” (the 174-year-old magazine’s December cover story) with an unsettling personal tragedy, telling readers of the day his mother lost both her legs. She was run over by a bus while on her way to the Barbican Art Gallery, where she had planned to see “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art”—the exhibition that serves as Kissick’s first case study on the precipitous decline of contemporary art in the past decade.
