Portal Seecult.org organised round table Critical art and responsible culture: No Anaesthesia! which was held in Belgrade (Serbia) in the first part of December.

The round table gathered artists and cultural operators from Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia. Speakers were Vladan Jeremić from Belgrade, Nataša Bodrožić from Zagreb, Milena Kosec from Ljubljana, Igor Toševski from Skopje, and curator Maja Ćirić from Belgrade was the moderator of the round table.

Some of the questions on which discussion was based were: reviewing the position, practice and models of critical art through 4 regional examples - Impulses and intensity of critical art and responsible culture - representation or intervention? Status quo or step forward? Confrontation or manipulation? State cultural engineering or partial, but focused individual practice?

This discussion on complex theme explored critical art as unpredictable impulse of dominant cultural and political paradigm, and stressed anti-politics as an alternative to predictable policy, i.e. to direct and unable politisation. Discussion was started by the assumption that responsibility does not arise from confrontation of art and politics, but from their active relationship. According to Jacques Rancière, political entity able to take responsibility for culture, is not a political lobby, nor individuals seeking adequate representation for their interests and ideas. Political subject is an empty operator that creates instances of political debate by constantly causing established framework for identification and classification. To indicate the new forms of critical subjectivity, it is necessary to examine the relationship between institutions and cultural operators and to emphasise the potential of art to create a radical critical knowledge.

The discussion emphasised the anti-politics that would stimulate the resources for effective and responsible culture. The round table is designed as a platform for inducing predictable policy, i.e. the direct apparent politicisation, thus indicating a cultural operators who have the awareness of the crisis of representation and instruments to create differences, and political subjects, which are not politically corrupted.

One of the key issues in the discussion was related to questioning of successfulness of critical art. Regardless of the perspective of critics we can say that we should argue for critical art. Namely, if we give up at the begging on criticism, it would not be possible to expect any changes which could be result of such art. In addition, it is not that the arts should lead an active process of advocacy, but they have the power to ask the right questions, define, articulate and draw attention to the problem and to the creative and emotional way that can reach people. Thus, artists and cultural operators in their nomadic mechanism of functioning are dancing around the problem and always re-opening of the new situation. This is the potential of art and culture that can, if nothing else, at least contribute to the correction of the society.

This round table is a part of a two-year project Let's Talk Critic Art which is initiated by culture portal for Southeast Europe SEEcult.org from Belgrade, in cooperation with SCCA-Ljubljana/Artservis, Kulturpunkt.hr from Zagreb and the ForumSkopje in Skopje. The project is supported by European Cultural Foundation (ECF) and Goethe-Instituta Belgrade / Stability Pact for Southeast Europe.

The project Let's Talk Critic Art is focused on the critical examination of various aspects of contemporary culture and arts through round tables, public interviews and documentation and archiving of organized events that will be published on the portals that are gathered around this project.