The Gutter Art Critic

This story was first published on Ten Fifteen, a semi-regular blog/newsletter about art, philosophy and cultural theory. Sign up here .    Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better, Fail a Lot, Fail Up On the morning of November 17, 1989, Ludvik Zifcak got up and made himself breakfast and tea. He did not rush, because the work he was about to do would not have to be done until evening. He turned on his Soviet-era color television, with its two channels, blurry images and sepia undertones, dressed while he sipped tea and read the minutes of a meeting he attended the day before. He was a special undercover agent of the Czechoslovak secret police (StB) and that evening he was to lead a group of students protesting against the communist government into a trap. Just weeks prior the East Germans have breached the Berlin Wall and toppled its government. In just a couple of weeks, the standing Czechoslovak government will transfer its power to the new coalition of artists, actors, economists

                November 1989. Prague. The Berlin Wall came down just a few short weeks prior and a few hundred students are marching from the top of Vysehrad hill toward Wenceslas Square. At some point the group is seen to diverge from its set path. The theory is that a plain clothes secret police officer had ingratiated himself in the front of the group and with the explicit order to lead the students into a narrow corridor where the police, suited up in riot gear, was waiting. Blindsighted, the students marched, believing that in a just a few hours they will be home in their beds after making their voices heard. What followed was a televised spectacle of violence as the riot police in white helmets corralled the crowd into a narrow pedestrian underpassage where each protester could be individually beaten in a kind of a medieval gauntlet. Busted heads and knocked out teeth. Dubbed the Velvet Revolution, the 1989 uprising against the oppressive government was anything but. It was pe