This booklet was published on the occasion of Dieter Hacker’s solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in London in 1979. In the exhibition, Hacker subjected the art and practices of nine artists – Dieter Krieg, Roy Lichtenstein, Renzo Vespignani, Victor Vasarely, Sarah Schumann, Willi Sitte, Jörg Immendorff, Yves Klein and Hans-Jürgen Diehl – to a series of pointed critiques.

Hacker’s caustic series of ‘J’accuse’ is prefaced by a manifesto, transcribed from the booklet:

“Stupidity in art starts with the training of the artist and ends with the marketing and reception of his work. In this oppressive climate stupid art flourishes.
Stupidity in art has a tradition. Ever since art freed itself from a direct social purpose, the foundations of its independence have often worked against it: the artist’s individual responsibility for his creation can lead to an egocentric withdrawal from the real world, and artistic freedom can isolate the artist from his public. Out of this division has grown up an attitude toward art which puts vague feeling before lucid thought, and this in turn has fostered stupid art.
Stupidity in art is not something that can be universally defined. The forms it can take are too various.
Accordingly, we have taken nine pictures – it could just as easily have been ninety-nine – to demonstrate nine different kinds of stupidity. In the case of each picture, only its most important aspect is considered.
The nine artists have been grouped under three headings: the different categories of art they represent; the various regions in which they work and are operative and the one common factor to them all – stupid pictures. Their coming together in the gallery of stupid art does not, however, imply equal artistic merit. Some are important artists, others superfluous. Some are champions, others local matadors.”

Among the individual accusations, Hacker argues, for instance, that Lichtenstein’s slick, seemingly effortless mode of “picture-quotation” had hardened into an empty mannerism, embodying both the culmination and the exhaustion of American Pop Art’s uncritical engagement with consumer culture. His criticism of Yves Klein is directed less at the work itself than at its uncritical, quasi-cultic reception, which, in Hacker’s view, transformed a potentially interesting experimenter into a hollow mystical guru.

The resulting suite of critiques is at once polemical and incisive. It is followed by an Hacker’s English translation of a 1974 lecture on the meaning of painting given by Hans Haacke to his students.