Like any good detective story, the history of art is filled with enigmas, myths and riddles waiting to be unraveled. Curated by Cristina Ricupero (Curator and writer, Paris), The Crime Was Almost Perfect will blow a wind of suspense through the rooms of Witte de With. The exhibition convenes over thirty international artists and a collection of mysterious objects to act as characters in a sprawling crime story, in which the visitors are invited to take part.

Although the link between art and crime can be traced back to ancient times, Thomas De Quincey explicitly theorized this connection in his notorious “On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts” (1827). The nineteenth century also saw the growing importance of photography both in the development of criminology and the new sensationalism of the tabloid press – two phenomena that popularized the genre of the detective story. Cinema soon became the perfect medium for capturing the dubious charm of violence and transforming it into pleasurable images.

Following De Quincey’s ironical proposal to analyze murder from an aesthetic point of view, The Crime was Almost Perfect is an exhibition that invokes the spirits of visual art, architecture, cinema, criminology and the modern crime genre, presenting contemporary artists who cross the bridge of art and the aesthetics of crime. Together, they transform the rooms of Witte de With and the streets of Rotterdam into multiple “crime scenes.”

Beyond crime, there is Evil. Thus The Crime Was Almost Perfect necessarily examines the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Questioning the role of authorship, authenticity, trickery and fraud, the exhibition blurs the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” taste, while also highlighting the double bind of “Crime as Art” and “Art as Crime.”

-Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Image: © Dan Attoe, Cedars on the Black Road, 2013
Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin