A significant part of the artistic contributions to the Documenta in Kassel, which opens on June 18, is now made up of press releases.

The one from Tuesday evening reported that the Documenta house WH22, in which the collective The Question of Funding, which has been confronted with anti-Semitism allegations for months, is also exhibiting, was broken into and, among other things, the graffiti “187” and “PERALTA” were left behind.

The numbers referred, it is said, "probably to the California Penal Code for murder", the "PERALTA" could be an allusion to the name of the leader of a right-wing extremist youth organization in Spain.

The documenta collective Ruangrupa has filed a criminal complaint and regards the acts as an "attack on all of us, the lumbung members".

In the American media, this immediately became “threats to Palestinian artists in Germany”.

Of course, burglary and graffiti are punishable.

But then the reaction of Kassel’s Lord Mayor Christian Geselle is quoted in the press release: “Having discussions about documenta fifteen is one thing, wanting to intimidate artists with criminal offenses goes far beyond what is acceptable and damages the image of the city Kassel as a place of artistic freedom.” Nobody will contradict that either.

But this is immediately followed by an outrageous sentence: "All those involved should be aware of their responsibility and stand up for common cooperation." As it stands, "all those involved" refers to the criminal offenses incriminated in the previous sentence.

Does Geselle really want to lump menacing scribblers with those interested in a debate?

If the people discussing in most German newspapers for a justified reason are directly complicit in the graffiti as mental arsonists, they may have even soiled the Kassel WH22 themselves in a night-and-fog operation in order to avoid their, according to their journeyman, their "responsibility" apparently not " to reinforce "conscious" criticism?

Anti-Semitism Commissioner intervened

The collective liability proposed by the mayor is ultimately aimed at the federal government and in particular Minister of State Claudia Roth, who finances the documenta.

Felix Klein, the federal government's anti-Semitism commissioner, officially announced at the beginning of this week that the assumption had to be made that Israeli artists were being boycotted by the Documenta.

The German-Jewish artist Leon Kahane wrote that the relativism with which Ruangrupa, among other things, also tolerates BDS-related positions at the Documenta “relates anti-Semitism in a fairly self-righteous way”.

This self-righteousness continues in the response to the graffiti.