L'antidote de l'attitude

The group exhibition No Dandy, No Fun, a fascinating enquiry into dandyism in art, was meant to be thegrand finale of the Kunsthalle Bern's recent sequence of shows featuring dandy artists such as Michael Krebber and Marc Camille Chaimowicz. In opposition to essentialist conceptions of identity, the dandy is presented as a counter-model who makes his life his work of art in an act of simultaneous exuberant self-affirmation and fantasized self-effacement. For this inclusive re-reading, the curators Hans-Christian Dany and Valérie Knoll have endowed the dandy, who above all embodies an attitude, with augmented subversive powers.