Den liberala demokratins konstkritiska protest

Abstract

Claims that liberal democracy is in crisis need to reckon with the fact that it is a social system historically premised on crisis and criticality. Protest and protesting can, from this standpoint, be viewed as constitutive boundary phenomena of liberal democracy. By considering liberal democracy as a critical life form from a biopolitical perspective, the aim of the article is to suggest how liberal democracy itself can protest art-critically and that this indicates a crisis of its critical life form that is rarely acknowledged. The article argues that the crisis of liberal democracy in Sweden is made visible in the racial aspects of art-critical protests. The claim is also that these art-critical protests, in their turn, must be understood through an analysis of the relationship between, on the one hand, art criticism and citizenship and, on the other, the class relation and capital accumulation. In the article, this is demonstrated through an account of the biopolitical function of the aesthetic culture of the critical tradition, followed by two recent examples of the art-critical protest of liberal democracy. Whereas one of these examples represents a liberal critique of identity politics in art, the other demonstrates a transgression of the liberal principle of arm’s length distance in culture policy. The article concludes that the aesthetic culture of the critical tradition, strategically taken over by the Social Democrats at the dawn of liberal democracy, enabled a continuous reformation of how politics in liberal democracy is organically developed, and that the art-critical protest of liberal democracy today challenges this critical life form.