LEFT WING HOBBIES

This year I'm publishing on underground movements—graffiti writers, hackers, old-school video-bloggers, hooligans. Not as sociology but as research for our documentary series LEFT WING HOBBIES, part of DE ROTTERDAMSE BEELDMAATSCHAPPIJ. Call it journalism, call it pamphleteering. We're after facts, as many as possible.

Here's why it matters: there's a discrepancy between how art is officially defined and how it actually works. The institutional art world talks about art as visionary, deviant, independent—while operating through carefully managed budgets, subsidies, and market mechanisms. Everything contained in its proper silo.

But graffiti writers, taggers, hackers? They still operate on necessity. You make it because you have to, because the world doesn't make sense otherwise. No applications, no advisory boards, no waiting for permission. Art that emerges from friction rather than frameworks.

After months of research, I see them as a missing link—not marginal curiosities but examples of what art looks like when it comes from deep sources rather than institutional mandates. They might hold an answer to a question I've been sitting with: how does the Western art world escape its self-constructed prison?

Maybe it doesn't. Maybe the real work happens in the cracks.

Don't underestimate the culture of hooligans