Just got an invitation for this in my inbox, Alfredo Jaar’s The Marx Lounge:

For The Marx Lounge by Alfredo Jaar, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam has been transformed into a reading room with comfortable sofas, reading lamps and a large reading table. This table offers a myriad of publications with topics spanning Marxist theory, capitalism, neo-liberalism, post-colonialism, globalization, cultural theory, politics and philosophy. The exhibition is an invitation to the viewer to sit back and become immersed in this wealth of knowledge.[…]

Jaar said: “I believe an intellectual revolution has been going on for the past 20 or 30 years, but I also see an extraordinary gap between this intellectual revolution and the real world… Is this gap a symptom of the difficulty of apprehending this new knowledge, or is it in the interests of the status quo to keep it the way it is? Besides hundreds of books by and about Marx, you will find political theorists and philosophers like Zizek, Hall, Rancière, Butler, Laclau, Mouffe, Jameson, Bourdieu, Fanon etc. For me these writings offer us models of thinking the world. And that is what I try do as an artist—I create models of thinking. I view The Marx Lounge as a space of resistance, or as David Harvey would call it, a space of hope.”[…]

The Marx Lounge will also contain a substantial amount of literature by Dutch thinkers, including Bosma, Buruma, Heijne, Hirsi Ali, Leerssen, Scheffer and Schinkel. Their work maps the local and political repercussions of global changes; changes that also ultimately impact upon the visual arts and critical art theory and prompt a re-evaluation of the role of art and art institutions in a post-colonial society.

Teehee, “Marxist Artist”. I am the Mutley who laughs at your use of big words like “post colonial society” and then proceeds to list a litany of “thinkers” who are all white, the vast majority male and the only non white exception is a very polarizing former Muslim woman who White dudes happen to love for reasons totally related to “non post colonial” ways of relating to the “Other”. But carry on, “Marxist Artist”, I am sure your exhibition will get accolades from other White dudes who love to pat themselves in the back at how “tolerant” and liberal they are.

ETA: As it’s been pointed in the replies, Fanon and Hall are non White, but my commentary was more inspired by the Dutch names I saw in the list and mostly, by placing Hirsi Ali as representative of the kind of Dutch intellectual spaces that the lounge wishes to illustrate.

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