It’s important to challenge this distance of theory from practice.

Interviewee: Grant Kester

It’s important to question the division between theory and practice, or between analysis and political engagement, that is so typical in art theory. It’s also evident in the mythos of revolutionary politics, in which the Leninist leader returns from a solitary immersion in Hegel with the necessary vision to instruct the masses as to the proper form of insurrection. The idea back then was that after the revolution, after the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, we won’t have a separate class of intellectuals, and everybody will be an artist or a thinker. Today the reason to ask these questions has nothing to do with some problematic historical teleology, but simply because, when intellectual production comes into contact with practice, you get more interesting results. It produces important critical insight.