<nettime> RIP Steven Kurtz

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear all, 

I was moved by Ted’s orbituary of Keith Hart. Thanks a lot for that.

Maybe some of you have heard that Steven Kurtz died last week. He was founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble and a nettime contribitor from day one). He struggled with cancer for some time but then came back. We were in contact last over the summer about CAE’s new Autonomedia book came out about Christian nationalism—such a relevant topic, specially after seeing Donatella Della Ratta’s ‘speculative violence’ performance last night, here in Amsterdam, about Trump’s Gaza Riviera and the madness around the building of the third temple. He told me that "New York University's Downtown Collection came and got the CAE archive, so that is taken care of.  I can still write, so I'm writing articles about art and politics (cultural activists) for museums." He recently wrote to to me: "I'm still alive, but how much longer is always a question. Never surrender, Steve.” For many, nettime is CAE and visaversa. Do any of you have more information, plans, responses? I saw the Wikipedia page changed but that’s all so far.

Yours, Geert

https://autonomedia.org/product/unreality-and-its-discontents-the-struggle-against-christian-nationalism-by-the-critical-art-ensemble/

> On 8 Nov 2025, at 14:11, GM - tedbyfield via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> 
> < https://johnkeithhart.muchloved.com/?brid=zNuPwEY7u-01h6x57VsZ8Q >
> 
> Over the 25 years I co-moderated this list, I wrote lots of memorials. It felt like a burden, and now it’s someone else’s — or maybe no one’s. For now, it’s enough to say that Keith’s voice was profoundly important for nettime, in ways that were never fully acknowledged. Like many people whose intellect drove wide-ranging lives, he could be difficult at times. But that often reveals how difficult it is for them. In Keith’s case, his thinking was both encyclopedic and razor-sharp; and he brought that not just to traditional ways of understanding and applying anthropology, but also to less conventional fields — in particular, the relationships between memory and money or wealth or however we to accumulate. At some point he told me that as a youth he’d been at excellent at math(s), which enabled him to make a small fortune gambling; and that, in turn, had given him the freedom to study, think, travel, and live as he chose. In the course of that, he’d invested in a house near Durban, SA, I think — in part because he was pessimistic about the course the world is taking and had concluded that area would be one of the best to weather what’s coming. These days, that might sound a bit ‘preppy’ as (in in preppers), but it was more aligned to Fernand Braudel. For Keith, the challenge wasn’t just to find the world-historical in everyday details and vice versa, it was to do so in ways that enabled us to act rather than paralyze us. It was that relentlessly speculative drive that led him to nettime and kept him here for so long. This list is, as the metaphor goes, much richer for it; and though he hasn’t contributed in a long time, our imagined community is in some ways — not all — poorer for his loss.
> 
> Ted
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