Peter Kruse is talking about the necessity to think about how to set up new systems and not to improve or build upon old ones. He is explaining this while using MINDKISS, an art project, as an example. We need to re-define what capitalism and wealth mean.

1. Empathy. Experiment. Provocation.
Interview with Prof. Peter Kruse. By Ulrike Reinhard.
May 2015
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2. Ulrike Reinhard: The Mindkiss Project is now
in its fifth year. And Peter you were really
one of the first to pick up on it. What
grabbed your interest, aroused your
curiosity, about the concept when you first
came across it?
Peter Kruse: Well, actually what first excited
me and has continued to do so ever since is
the fact that the project is continually evol-
ving and evolving more or less in the way a
living organism evolves. There was nothing
about it you could point to and say this is all
organized, set, and planned from start to
finish. No, it really was moving through
phases of growth, change and sudden
unexpected transformations. In other words
it kept you sitting on the edge of your seat.
In the beginning for me it was a kind of
encounter. There was somebody with a
biographical situation – actually a very sad
biographical situation – who had produced
an incredible amount of work, who hadn’t
mimicked the way other artists work, who
hadn’t tried to make a name for himself, who
had shunned publicity. This struck me as
something really extraordinary. And then
being suddenly confronted with this huge
body of work which was totally unknown.
That was simply amazing. In my encounter I
was suddenly standing before one of his
paintings – a painting that nobody could
explain to me because the artist was dead,
and nobody had given any previous
explanations. There was no art historian or
art critic to construct some majestically
comprehensive framework of reference and
interpretation after the death of the artist
precisely because these works were
produced in complete isolation from the
mainstream art business. So this was a
certain kind of encounter with art of a highly
vulnerable and even slightly virginal kind
which posed the inevitable question of
whether a work of art can exist when nobody
has constructed a frame of reference for it.
That at the very beginning was the first
surprise.
Ulrike Reinhard: Perhaps to give a little
background to people who might not be so
familiar with the story. An Encounter is an
event where Dagmar Woyde-Koehler, the
initiator of the Mindkiss Project, travels to
people, selected people, with a painting by
OUBEY and places it on an easel in a room.
Peter Kruse: Yes. So suddenly you’re
standing face to face with something that
makes you wonder whether such an
encounter can, in some shape or form, be
something more. Can it build something,
create something? And then after a short
time you begin to ask yourself whether
perhaps there really is something like a
discernible form of order that goes beyond
this particular situation.
That’s what happened to me with the pain-
ting which Dagmar Woyde-Koehler had
selected for me. I remember that at the time
I called the painting shameless because it
mocked all frames of reference. It didn’t
have its own framework but it didn’t need
one either. And I noticed that this triggered a
whole heap of associations in my mind. And,
interestingly enough, these were associa-
tions that were anything but strange to me
so that I gradually began to get the feeling
that either this guy was a kindred spirit who
expressed things in a way that was very
dear to me or he was someone who had
seen things that I had seen only in some
different way. Subsequently, from what
Dagmar Woyde-Koehler told me, I had the
inkling that there was a personal kinship
between us – that we didn’t just see the
same things but had a similar way of looking
at them too. There was almost a feeling of
comforting familiarity about it, like meeting
up with a good old friend. And that really
amazed me. So the first dimension of this
whole project for me was this personal
encounter.
Only this evolved still further. As I mentioned
before, the basic situation radiates life. New
things spring up suddenly.
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3. And that there is a larger order in which we
participate creatively and in which, when
presented, we can recognize a piece of
ourselves. And I believe that this experiment
which Woyde-Koehler is running is only
possible when this sense of recognition is
given. Because in itself an encounter with a
canvas cannot generate this. Some kind of
superordinate points of resonance must be
given. So the second thing that intrigued me
was to try out this experimental part, going
beyond the classical landscape of art to do
something with art.
And the third part which has grown over the
past few months as I’ve been ruminating
about it so much is the question of what we
mean exactly when we talk about the art
world or art business.
For instance, I remember once scratching
my head about Damien Hirst who, in 2008 I
think it was, went and worked with Sotheby’s
to make an exhibition solely of objects inten-
ded for auction. And this auction brought in
something in the order of over one hundred
million dollars which made me wonder what
the hell was going on here.
And then it struck me that, oddly enough,
this wasn’t just about people encountering
the paintings because a kind of cultural
communicative network began to be spun
around the whole thing. In other words the
whole thing becomes much bigger in the
second dimension than merely encountering
an artist through his work. Which means
that it takes on the mantle of some kind of
cultural experiment. And what makes this
particularly interested is that it’s a cultural
experiment in which, from the very
beginning, Dagmar Woyde-Koehler has
shunned all kinds of reference to the
established art business. I found this
extraordinarily intriguing because I noticed
that what was alluded to here was a
dimension that resists easy assimilation in
the received canons of museum art to enact
itself more or less as a process of inter-
action. And this has evolved yet again
across the world and attracted a huge
number of followers which now leads me to
believe that what OUBEY expressed in his
paintings isn’t only understandable if you
have a personal affinity to the artist,
because to some extent he also, should we
say, hit on particular ways of viewing the
world. And this reminds me not a little of our
good old Joseph Beuys who talked about
the concept of social sculpture and how we
are actually all artists and how we all
participate in a communal social enterprise
which we produce as a cultural collective.
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4. Art, the expression of cultural intelligence,
perhaps creating something which we do
collectively, is suddenly commercialized on a
scale that leaves you gasping in disbelief. And
then you come across people like Banksy
whose art is a strategy of conscious subver-
sion of the art market. But the more you
ponder and reflect on this, the more apparent
it becomes that what is happening in the art
business is not just confined to the art world
alone but is actually an extremely telling
symbol or symptom, if you want, of the non-
stop commercialization of the world. We act
as though everything in the world is governed
by market dynamics. This alone should give
you pause for thought. Because if there’s one
thing I can say for certain, it’s that the field of
culture which is the preserve of art – is the
least suitable to be turned into a commercial
marketplace.
There’s a great deal of money sloshing
around and this money is desperately trying
to find some kind of value. So we turn a
cultural event into a marketplace. And one
thing I do know, at least as far as my own
understanding of art goes, is that art must
always provoke and basically must be
moving to produce culture. This means that
art is a powerful instrument to enhance the
richness of culture. But if we commercialize
this process, it is precisely the contribution
made by art that we lose. Because basically,
whether directly or indirectly, the artist must
always seem attractive to those with money
in their pockets. This means that the artist is
forced to bend and compromise. And then
you begin to look around, to ask pointed
questions, to talk to young artists and you
see that some of them have the anger about
what is happening written in their faces. I
then looked at young photographers, young
filmmakers and spent some time chatting
with them. And what they told me was
always the same – that they’d tried time and
again and in all kinds of ways to break into
this market. And now we have agencies
specialized in providing introductions to
galleries and markets for a fee. This works
along the lines of – give me your photos and
I’ll make sure you get an exhibition in
Shanghai. You pay me € 30,000 for my
services and I’ll get you in. Or if you’re a
filmmaker, I’ll guarantee you’re screened at
the key festivals. So what has now sprung
up is a kind of intermediary market which
makes its living by bringing others into a
situation where they can live from their art.
And then you see that what we are blatantly
doing here is making a systemic error of
gargantuan proportions. We are super-
imposing what we know from the economic
context onto the cultural context. And this
brings us to the third – and for me personally
the most interesting – dimension of OUBEY
and the Mindkiss project into which we really
need to put some serious thinking. It is the
question of how we wish to organize the
system ‘world’, as we are building it, in the
future. We act as though the whole world
were a huge market. And we only do so
because we’ve forgotten how to differentiate.
We believe that if we no longer can under-
stand the world then at least the invisible
hand of the market might fix it in one way or
another. Whether I now want to get hot
under the collar about the economy is an-
other question. And I could get very hot
about it because I now no longer even
believe that we should retain the market
principle in the financial and economic
context on this level of triviality. But if it’s
applied it to the cultural context or educa-
tional context then I really can say in all
earnestness that what we are doing is
putting our worst foot forward. Moving ahead
with eyes wide shut. In other words at the
present juncture we need to reflect long and
deeply on questions such as – what will
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5. tomorrow’s systems look like? How do we
build society? In what kind of a society do
we want to live in? These are questions of
fundamental importance which – in my
opinion at least – have shown the right kind
of evolution in the OUBEY Project. Beginn-
ing with a single person, evolving into a kind
of cultural communicative experiment and
then evidencing for all to see that some-
thing can live and flourish beyond the con-
fines of the established art business. Or if
you will: an experimental demonstration of a
deficit on the other side – which raises the
need for serious thought about a change to
the system.
And you could spend some time thinking
how to interlock all this closely. How, for
instance, can I make sure that capital always
remains just capital when used to finance
culture? The moment capital is used only to
produce more capital, it is no longer reaso-
nable. Perhaps the point is to become a little
sharper in differentiating between concepts.
Perhaps the point is to get a very clear
notion that the concept of wealth doesn’t
always have to do with money but also with
capability. And when wealth in the sense of
money doesn’t generate wealth in the sense
of capability then it should no longer be
called wealth. This means that we need to
consider how we can make it socially
desirable that capital should only be allowed
for suitable uses when it forms part of the
social organism, when it is deployed for
purposes of social design not in the sense of
commissioned work, not in the sense of
exerting influence, but rather in the sense of
the purposeful financing of free spaces.
And that demands political and social struc-
ture. We can’t just simply go in and say, OK,
the financial market is the true hegemony
and all the rest is derivative. Slowly but sure-
ly this would mean drowning in absurdity
because everybody bends in the direction of
the financial market. This means that we
must consider how this can be organized in
a bedrock way. And that is an extremely
political question.
Ulrike Reinhard: The OUBEY project has a
clear patron – it is financed by one single
person, Dagmar Woyde-Koehler who provides
this space. One does need money ...
Peter Kruse: Only now we can see what is at
issue. In other words we cannot consider
these systems in splendid isolation from one
another. We must consider the cultural space,
and perhaps the legal space and the econo-
mic space collectively. I mean we can naturally
also delve a bit into anthroposophy with its
threefold social organism.
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6. We are simply faced with the basic problem
that since the demise of communism we
have lost our bogeyman. And now we really
do believe that we have won with our demo-
cratic principles and capitalism of the type
we favor. And all I can say is listen up you
guys, we’ve won absolutely nothing because
our whole system is stretching at the limits of
its capacity or has long since exceeded
them. In other words the crux of the matter is
that when you’ve lost your bogeyman you
stop developing because you believe the
game’s yours, you’ve won it. And the
pressing development issue of the moment
with democratic systems lies in the question
of how we want to deal with capitalism on
the global level, and more precisely with the
kind of capitalism which we believe has
established itself as the one and only true
principle. Yet liberalized markets are no
sustainable principle. No cultural richness
lies in following that path. You can see how
this is playing out in submarkets and on the
global level. You just can’t go in, for
instance, and allow globalization to take
capital out of regional cultures. You have to
find ways in which capital can be pumped
back into culture without intervening in its
meaning. Freedom of cultural expression
must be retained. And so step by step what
we must do is think seriously about how we
design and shape our systems. At this point
in time we can no longer optimize our sys-
tems. Nor is it now enough to find new types
of order within an existing system. The
whole point at our present juncture is to create
new systems. And that’s something that, oddly
enough, nearly everybody in society is well
aware of. When we interview people, the data
tells us that over three quarters of the people
know that we’re on the threshold of a transfor-
mation of the third order. In other words: not im-
proving on what’s already there, and also not
taking a different approach to tackle what’s al-
ready there but creating fundamental new sys-
tems for doing things differently. We must chan-
ge the rules of the game by which our societies
live, otherwise they will no longer function.
Ulrike Reinhard: So in your eyes the project is
a role model for a new system?
Peter Kruse: Yes, that’s the odd bit, isn’t it?
Yes, it really does open the three dimensions
one after the other. First, the dimension of the
private encounter. Then the dimension of the
experiment, the communicative cultural expe-
riment. And then over the experimental charac-
ter the actual third dimension of the critical re-
view and, if you will, of provocation. This
means it has very clear dimensions. A little
empathy, a little experiment, and a great deal
of provocation. And I think this makes it some-
thing that’s well worth while keeping your eye
on.
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