Maybe this is a time to look for something else in art, to look at art that resonates with this moment on the precipice of authoritarianism, and to learn from it. What can be gleaned by reconsidering art made in similarly dangerous situations in the past, not with the complacent relief of historical distance, but with an awakened sense of urgency for our own time and place?
Today I was at the Humboldt Forum for the first time—first time inside the doors, at least, since I had wandered around the outside of the building on the weekend. It is a strange building, at once a fifteenth-century palace (substantially enlarged in the seventeenth century) and a twenty-first-century simulacrum.
For the Sandler Essay in our summer issue, I offer my translation of a writing by François Hers, an artist and the founder of Les Nouveaux Commanditaires, in English, New Patrons, a program of community-driven artistic production.