The Carnival of Popularity: Wresting the Popular from Populism

What do I mean by the title, The Carnival of Popularity? And how exactly does it fit with the theme of our congress? The Carnival of Popularity grew up around a single initial stimulus. It was a 1.5-minute film clip, from 1927, found on social media, showing a pageant or carnival conducted by Shetland Islanders in a poor, rural community in the far North of the British Isles.1 What made me write about, around and in response to this clip was a certain hunch or intuition that here might lie some clue, maybe even some possible solution, to one of the biggest cultural and political problems facing us today, i.e. the erosion of a once progressive and optimistic, post WW2 model or ideal, of an increasingly mobile, multicultural and international society, the threatened collapse of that ideal into today’s increasingly divided societies. I’m talking about the corruption and diversion of democracy’s promissory trajectory by the rising forces of populism. I’m talking about trying to rescue that trajectory

Paul O’Kane is a critic, musician, and author. In both his practice and his lectures, he connects criticism and popular culture; in doing so, he stands for a perspective that knows and reflects class struggles and seeks a dissenting voice, with which the power of the popular opposes the calls to power of populism. O’Kane presents the carnival – or, more methodologically speaking – the carnivalesque as a historical form of cultural production ›from below‹ and asks about the possibilities of transferring carnivalesque practices into today’s culture and class struggles. In addition to cultural-historical examples, concepts by thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin are also brought into focus. Finally, the question arises as to whether carnivalesque strategies are also suitable for an art-critical practice, and whether they are advisable to position the popular against the populist.

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My role as editor and copy-editor of the English edition of this publication, which documents the 52nd International Congress of the Art Critics Association (AICA), which met in 2019 in Cologne and Berlin to discuss the topic of Art Criticism in Times of Populism and Nationalism. More than forty speakers and moderators provided a definition of populism, addressed issues of discrimination, censorship in many countries, and the appropriation of artistic strategies in ‘right-wing’ language use. The autonomy and responsibility of art and art criticism were also thematised. The discussions reproduced here in text form reveal the full complexity of the topic.

The documentation is published in two separate German and English volumes.

CITE THUS:
Perrier, Danièle (Ed.): Art Criticism in Times of Populism and Nationalism: Proceedings of the 52nd International AICA Congress, Cologne/Berlin 1–7 October 2019, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.891