The Manhattan Art Review Goes to Europe: Kirac vs Houellebecq
KIRAC’s gonzo filmmaking shatters art world niceties, but their entanglement with Michel Houellebecq—novelist, provocateur, reluctant porn star—turns chaotic. As lawsuits fly and reputations fray, the real spectacle isn’t the film itself but the battle over who gets to tell the story.
By Sean Tatol
Issue 1, Summer 2023/24
One of the central problems in contemporary art is a profound lack of novelty. Defining exactly what that means gets complicated quickly, but for the sake of this article it suffices to say that art today seems, perhaps for the first time, nearly incapable of producing work that is meaningfully “of its time.” Pop reference-jamming and self-righteous moralising abstracts from the material facts of the present, just as surely as historical nostalgia and tech futurism try to simply sidestep it; artists everywhere operate as a horde of bad consciences simultaneously trying to repress their insecure awareness that they aren’t quite sure what they should be doing. Precious few exceptions to this trend have emerged in the past decade — artists with a certainty of creative direction that leads them to make work that reflects the world back at us instead of shying away from it — and one of my favourite examples from this category is the Dutch film collective KIRAC.
