Jonathan Guggenberger: "Opferkunst" - Lesung

In the organizer's words:

Venice, April 2024, International Art Biennale: Irish performance artist Aaron Geldof goes up in flames on a cross - for the freedom of Palestine; a sacrificial death. The media and politicians in Germany quickly recognized the real motive for his martyrdom: Hatred of Jews. But for Geldof's closest confidant, the cultural journalist Enzo Bamberger, the flaming death in Venice was only one thing: art. On behalf of his British newspaper, he embarks on a journey into the depths of the art world. In the thicket of sex, power and manipulation, he gets on the trail of gray eminences with long fingernails who are spinning intrigues in the background. Do they have the answer to his question: Why did Aaron have to die?

"A text even crazier than the milieu it deals with. If you only want to describe the insanity of the art world, you will fail because of your own harmlessness. It is therefore a question of increasing and surpassing the madness. Jonathan Guggenberger's Opferkunst does not aim to expose the anti-Semitism of the art world. Rather, the text captures it and looks at it from all sides. And turns his own bewilderment into a formal principle. Art is dead. Long live art." (Claudius Seidl)

"Satires are always particularly hard to bear when they could just as easily be true. Jonathan Guggenberger tells of the well-meaning, the benevolent, who always want to be on the right side of history - and at the same time are stupidly equipped with a huge sense of mission and little self-reflection. A really funny, appalling text about Germany and its artists." (Dana von Suffrin)

Jonathan Guggenberger studied fine arts, film and political science in Berlin. He conducted research on aesthetic strategies of political mobilization in social media at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, among others, and writes about digital visual cultures, contemporary art and cultural politics for taz, FAS and Der Freitag. His debut novel "Opferkunst" was published by Edition Tiamat in October.