TOKE LYKKEBERG

Toke Lykkeberg is a Danish curator, critic, consultant and director of the exhibition space Tranen. Currently, he is developing Tranen’s program with a focus on “extemporary art,” i.e. art that is not of its moment, but rather out of time. He has curated, among others, the shows “Welcome Too Late” (2017) at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen; “Co-Workers – The network as artist” (2015) at Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Nordic biennial for contemporary art, Momentum 8 (2015), in Moss, Norway. His writings have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, including Kunstkritikk, Spike Art Magazine and DISmagazine. He is also the co-founder of the former exhibition space IMO in Copenhagen, which he directed from 2009 to 2013.

Hector Obalk. Andy Warhol n’est pas un grand artiste. Paris: Flammarion, 1990.

Hector Obalk’s book Andy Warhol n’est pas un grand artiste created a stir when it was published in 1990. The established art world condemned it. Not only is it an extremely elegant read that presents a logical exposé of Warhol’s move from advertisement into art, but it is also for that same reason an all the more convincing dismissal of what Warhol is about. It took me years to recover from it. Though I now once again appreciate Warhol’s work, the book still stands for me as a role model of art criticism. In this book, Obalk presents Warhol in the best possible light—all while turning it off. Obalk is not looking for Warhol’s weak spots. He probes what’s most interesting in his practice before taking it apart. The fact that Jean Baudrillard joined the debate—by claiming that Warhol is not a bad artist since he is not an artist at all—proves how a bold monologue is sometimes a good starting point for an even bolder dialogue.

Nathalie Heinich. L’élite artiste. Excellence et singularité en régime démocratique. Paris: Gallimard, 2005.

The French Revolution did not only overrule privileges and the aristocratic elite. As the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich argues in this nuanced and thought-provoking study, it also led to the rise of a new privileged elite. The moment everybody became equal, a new burgeoning class of exceptional and singular artists rose to prominence. Everybody might be born equal, but some with the very special vocation and talent of a genius are above the norms and law of the rest of society. Heinich brilliantly argues how political and aesthetic avant-gardes don’t naturally align. In France, she is known as a conservative intellectual, but even progressives could learn a thing or two from her sociology of art. With the ideas of Heinich on one hand and Hector Obalk on the other, you will be able to fend for yourself in the art world.

Michel Serres. The Natural Contract. Originally published in French in 1990. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

While the iron curtain and the Soviet Union came tumbling down, Michel Serres looked elsewhere. In the very first pages of his essay The Natural Contract, first published in 1990, the French thinker plunges himself into an old painting by Francisco Goya. In Fight with Cudgels, we see two giant duelists fighting knee-deep in a swamp: “With every move they make, a slimy hole swallows them up, so that they are gradually burying themselves together. How quickly depends on how aggressive they are: the more heated the struggle, the more violent their movements become and the faster they sink in. The belligerents don’t notice the abyss they’re rushing into; from outside, however, we see it clearly.” While most people were celebrating the triumph of liberal democracy and progress, Serres probed our troubled relation to nature and the ecological crisis, which the Cold War overshadowed. In The Natural Contract, Serres conjures up a series of captivating images at the crossroads of poetry and philosophy.