Spooky Castle →

Video, 33:08
Collaboration with Aaron Moulton, Jak Ritger
Published on dis.art
It’s the 90s and the Eastern Bloc has fallen. You are Hungarian-American
billionaire, George Soros, and you see a golden opportunity to turn a bunch of
ex-commies into customers via ushering in free market capitalism and embedding
neoliberalism. What do you do? Among other things, Art. Not making it yourself,
of course. You put your NGO, The Open Society Institute, to work, funding a
network of 20 museums and art institutions that cover the region and spread the
most advanced curatorial program the world has ever seen.

This is the story of the forgotten Soros Centers for Contemporary Art… told for
the first time by our eerie-horned hosts Ba’al (Aaron Moulton) and his petrified
sidekick, JakRa (Jak Ritger) after eons of research. Is the SCCA to blame for the
craven "socially engaged" art that congests every biennial? Did they fund some of
the most thought-provoking and innovative art of the past few decades? While the idea
that Mr. Soros is a driving force behind the wokeification of our cultural institution
s is not a revelation to the paranoid among us, Ba'al and JakRa forgo the tinfoil hats
in favor of analytic rigor. Is it conspiracy or theory? Neither. It's art history.