In an effort to add to the debate on contemporary art, Witte de With organized lectures and debates. In these lectures and debates, the exhibitions, the work of the artist(s), and the underlying concepts or reactions which they produced, were commented upon. The lectures and debates were published every year, in an effort to permit fresh consideration and evaluation of the whole exhibition program. The publication The Lectures, 1991 includes the essays and readings concerning the program of Witte de With during 1991.
For the lectures of 1991, Witte de With invited the French film theorist Raymond Bellour, to lecture on the relationship between cinema and painting, on the occasion of the exhibition Cézanne, in which, amongst other works, the film Cézanne (1989), by the French film makers Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet was shown.
Further, in a debate that took place in the Rotterdam version of the auditorium installation Creation pendant le troisiéme age (1984), by the German artist Hermann Pitz, the curators Marianne Brouwer and Kasper Kӧnig and the artist Ludger Gerdes discussed the future of public sculptures before an enormous maquette for the new Rotterdam.
In conjunction with the exhibition of Jessica Stockholder and Saint Clair Cemin, the American art critic and artist John Miller conveyed his view on the history of assemblage in a lecture entitled The Avant-Garde, Sublimation and the Patriarchy, a sequel to his essay Formalism and its Other, published by Witte de With in the catalogue of Jessica Stockholder.
During Facts and Rumours, an exhibition curated by the Dutch artist Henk Visch, and Voorwerk 2, the Franco-Italian ethnologist Remo Guidieri presented a philosophical interpretation of the marriage between the creative process of art and the professionalization of the art world entitled Art and Politics, A Political Economy of Happiness II.
With the sixth exhibition of 1991, works by two different artists, the American painter Michael Byron and the Portuguese painter Julião Sarmento, were confronted. Under the title Geographics of Identity the Portuguese sociologist and art critic Alexandre Melo dealt with the relevance and non-relevance of the work outside the so-called ‘art centers’.
In conjunction with the exhibition South Bronx Hall of Fame by the Americans John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, which had presented an overview of their portrait-sculptures of neighbours and friends in the South Bronx, New York, the Belgian philosopher Bart Verschaffel presented the lecture On Deathmasks: What truths and lies appear in the countenance of the dead in portrait, print or casting?