Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Dieter Roelstraete

What is so singularly depressing about the political farce surrounding the proposed dismantling of M HKA is that the invoked logic of economic rationalisation still appears to have so much pull in political discourse. Haven’t the countless disasters of populist economics’ experiments with ‘austerity’ taught us anything? (The global political polycrisis is nothing other than the smouldering ruin of one such experiment in enforcing one austerity too many.) Indeed, it is utterly dispiriting that we find ourselves once again called upon to defend the various spaces of art as economically legitimate in their own right – and the fact that so many have so quickly and so vocally rallied to M HKA’s defence (even those relatively critical of that institution’s various perceived shortcomings) makes it abundantly clear that the vast majority of interested parties simply no longer buy the tired old canard of so-called ‘rationalisation’ – the last of the tenets of neoliberalism to go the way of the dodo. It is precisely this disconnect which unmasks the ministerial measure as the deeply undemocratic coup that it really is. None of us could have imagined that, in the year 2025 (of all years!), one must still come to the defence of art; and although most of us are beyond exhausted by the realisation that we have to do so regardless, we’ll rise to the challenge anyway. That in itself is a uniquely powerful indictment of the retrograde error of ‘their’ ways – as is the sobering fact that, as far as I can tell, absolutely no one seems to really want this move to happen anyway. And those who don’t care… simply don’t care.