The famous Prinzhorn collection in Heidelberg contains a fascinating drawing titled Beweise ( Proofs) made by schizophrenic psychiatric patient Jakob Mohr and dated 1910. Influencing machines Jakob Mohr, Beweise, 1910 In the face of these worrisome developments, was it ever a clever rhetorical move to reprofile an arts festival as a media consortium called Paranoia TV? Does it offer us a way out of said impasse? Before addressing these questions, let’s first take a curious historical detour. It’s hardly surprising since social media accelerates today’s polarizations, which further undermines the possibility of establishing a public forum, the very root of democracy. On the day of the opening, however, the regional chapter of the far-right populist political party FPÖ sent out a press release denouncing the entire festival for its ‘unnecessary’, ‘grotesque’ program and ‘greatest possible decadence’ in times of crisis, a statement that is once again symptomatic of the ideological fissures present in current society.
Her opening speech came in two different versions one pre-recorded and shown on different screens in cultural venues and stores throughout the city, while the other happened in real life at Graz’s Orpheum Theatre. The title Paranoia TV not only turns Steirischer Herbst into a media channel, but it reflects Degot’s typical tongue-in-cheek approach that was also present in last year’s Grand Hotel Abyss.
Luckily there's still plenty of things to see and do in the city of Graz itself. Arguably the cultural variant of home delivery, does a festival-on-demand format also work in practice? Does it reduce avid festival goers to passive couch potatoes? Opening speech by Ekaterina Degot. Via the website or designated app, the festival moves with you, across different screens, streamed smoothly to your ultra-wide HD smart television at home or to your smartphone on the commute to work. This time around, you no longer have to bother about running from one venue to another: you will receive convenient notifications about any upcoming events on your different devices. For the third year in a row, Ekaterina Degot is acting as director of the festival, clearly leaving her rather provocative stamp on the identity of Europe's oldest arts festival. In many respects, therefore, I’m glad to see Steirischer Herbst taking place in 2020, which surely hasn’t been an easy feat. Both sides of the ideological spectrum are caught up in a politics of cancellation, a cancellation culture problematic in and of itself, which should be met with elaborate criticism and forms of resistance. On the other hand, various cultural manifestations are being cancelled and censored in fear of rising tensions and possible reprisals, from a Fawlty Towers episode to a Philip Guston retrospective. Art as a ‘non-essential’ profession has by now become a widely proclaimed view in conservative circles. In many countries, this situation has sparked a heated debate about the “necessity” of art and culture, and how much a society should care about its artists.
The cultural sector is suffering immense economic losses due to the Covid-19-regulations, with little recovery in sight. Although there is a certain joy to be found in missing out on things (lifestyle magazines call it "jomo"), cancellations are usually no joke. But I don’t want to sound too suspicious here. If I wouldn’t know any better, I would have thought the cancellation was staged as part of the concept of Steirischer Herbst 2020. There’s a certain predictability to these “strange and uncertain times”, as most emails tend to read these days. The fact that my press trip to Graz got cancelled last-minute was to be expected. I believe there is something out there, watching us.
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