NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Pass the Bill and Take a Pill

via NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist:

Pass the Bill
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 17, 2009

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable.

But meanwhile, pass the health care bill.

Yes, the filibuster-imposed need to get votes from “centrist” senators has led to a bill that falls a long way short of ideal. Worse, some of those senators seem motivated largely by a desire to protect the interests of insurance companies — with the possible exception of Mr. Lieberman, who seems motivated by sheer spite.

But let’s all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.

At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

All of this would be paid for in large part with the first serious effort ever to rein in rising health care costs.

The result would be a huge increase in the availability and affordability of health insurance, with more than 30 million Americans gaining coverage, and premiums for lower-income and lower-middle-income Americans falling dramatically. That’s an immense change from where we were just a few years ago: remember, not long ago the Bush administration and its allies in Congress successfully blocked even a modest expansion of health care for children.

Bear in mind also the lessons of history: social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by. Thus Social Security originally had huge gaps in coverage — and a majority of African-Americans, in particular, fell through those gaps. But it was improved over time, and it’s now the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans.

Look, I understand the anger here: supporting this weakened bill feels like giving in to blackmail — because it is. Or to use an even more accurate metaphor suggested by Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, we’re paying a ransom to hostage-takers. Some of us, including a majority of senators, really, really want to cover the uninsured; but to make that happen we need the votes of a handful of senators who see failure of reform as an acceptable outcome, and demand a steep price for their support.

The question, then, is whether to pay the ransom by giving in to the demands of those senators, accepting a flawed bill, or hang tough and let the hostage — that is, health reform — die.

Again, history suggests the answer. Whereas flawed social insurance programs have tended to get better over time, the story of health reform suggests that rejecting an imperfect deal in the hope of eventually getting something better is a recipe for getting nothing at all. Not to put too fine a point on it, America would be in much better shape today if Democrats had cut a deal on health care with Richard Nixon, or if Bill Clinton had cut a deal with moderate Republicans back when they still existed.

But won’t paying the ransom now encourage more hostage-taking in the future? Maybe. But the next big fight, over the future of the financial system, will be very different. If the usual suspects try to water down financial reform, I say call their bluff: there’s not much to lose, since a merely cosmetic reform, by creating a false sense of security, could well end up being worse than nothing.

Beyond that, we need to take on the way the Senate works. The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren’t in the Constitution. They’re a Senate tradition, and that same tradition said that the threat of filibusters should be used sparingly. Well, Republicans have already trashed the second part of the tradition: look at a list of cloture motions over time, and you’ll see that since the G.O.P. lost control of Congress it has pursued obstructionism on a literally unprecedented scale. So it’s time to revise the rules.

But that’s for later. Right now, let’s pass the bill that’s on the table.

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HAPPY HOLIDAYS from NEWSgrist.

Whitney Biennial 2010: News + Views

Whitney Museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

via Lindsay Pollack - art market views:

Whitney Releases 2010 Biennial Picks

Curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari have announced the list of  artists for the 2010 Whitney Biennial.  The 75th edition runs Feb. 25-May 30. Eleven of the 55 artists have appeared in previous biennials. (Watch a video of the curators reading the list of artists here).

THE LIST

via NYMag's VULTURE:

Saltz on Art’s Triumph: Women Win Slim Majority in Next Whitney Biennial

12/11/09 at 2:28 PM

An art-world wall has fallen. The list of the 55 artists to be included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial was made public this morning, and 52 percent of those artists are women. Depending on where you stand, hell has frozen over, or there’s a fissure in the force. (The 2000 Biennial was made up of 36 percent women; in 2008, it was 40 percent.) When I asked curator Francesco Bonami about the unusually high percentage of women artists in his show, he said that he and associate curator, Gary Carrion-Murayari, “didn’t look for women artists. They were just in front of our eyes. It wasn’t conscious at all.” He added that it was “misleading” to think about the upcoming Biennial “in these terms.”

Perhaps. Still, the show will include excellent, newer, below-the-radar artists like performance chaos-creator Aki Sasamoto; Jessica Jackson Hutchins, whose arrangements of objects and ceramics create contradictory cosmic and formal storms; Kate Gilmore, who has been known to smash through Sheetrock walls while wearing party dresses and high heels; and Sharon Hayes, whose 2008 performance of her reading an imaginary letter about love and war on a midtown corner at lunch hour was one of the most moving things I saw that year. Also on hand will be powerful under-knowns Babette Mangolte, Dawn Clements, Suzan Frecon, and Lorraine O’Grady, who has invaded art openings dressed in various guises, addressing issues of race and class.

The inclusion of all the women artists in this cattle call does not mean that the upcoming Biennial will be much better or worse than usual. Art exhibitions should never be about quotas. Still, in all likelihood, Bonami’s 2010 Biennial will prove once and for all that women artists are no better and no worse than their male counterparts. Once this is acknowledged, we’ll be able to get on with the business-as-usual of tearing the Whitney Biennial to shreds. Or not.

via Two Coats of paint:

Thursday, December 10, 2009

18 painters selected for 2010 Whitney Biennial

According to Carol Vogel in the NY Times, the 2010 edition of the Whitney Biennial will not only try to chronicle current goings-on in contemporary art, but it will also reflect the world at large. "In these recessionary times, the show will be smaller than it has been in recent years, with just 55 artists, down from 81 in 2008 and 100 in 2006. It will also be contained in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s home, the Marcel Breuer building, rather than spilling over into a second location, as the 2008 Biennial did when it occupied much of the Park Avenue Armory or into Central Park as other Biennials have.

"Next year’s event, which runs from Feb. 25 through May 30, is being organized by Francesco Bonami, 54, the Italian-born curator who helped put together the Rudolph Stingel retrospective at the Whitney in 2007, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, 29, a senior curatorial assistant at the museum who helped with the Biennials in 2004 and 2006."

The eighteen painters include: [LINK]

Cherry Picker at the Whitney from joy garnett on Vimeo.

Cherry Picker at the Whitney, cont'd from joy garnett on Vimeo.

Artforum Racks 'em Up

 
L: Lynda Benglis Artforum ad (detail). 

R: Arthur Danto’s Andy Warhol (Icons of America) (Yale University Press, 2009)

via Artnet [excerpts]:

MAGAZINE RACK

by Grant Mandarino

[...]

Not to be outdone, Artforum this month [November] includes a review of Arthur Danto’s new book on Warhol, penned by Daniel Birnbaum, fresh from his summer job in Venice. Danto has been trying to strip Marcel Duchamp of his mantle for years and crown Warhol as the progenitor of all things postmodern. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, beloved of Danto, once referred to the emperor Napoleon as the "world soul on horseback" because of the way he embodied the zeitgeist of his era, and if Danto has his way, we would recognize the frazzled Warhol as a "world soul" in his own right, sans horse.

Warhol embraced the values of ordinary people, Danto claims, while Duchamp mocked them from the outside. Warhol was inclusive rather than subversive. Birnbaum suggests that Danto is rather too taken with his idol, practically elevating him to sainthood. Apparently the Brillo Box is compared at one point to the Holy Grail -- which is quite apt, at least in the sense that there have been many bogus grails, too.

More, more, more, the mag ain’t thick for nothing.[...]

Last month Artforum featured excerpts from the new book by anti-globalization gurus Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In his opening editorial this month, Tim Griffin revisits the question, in response to some negative feedback he received on that particular editorial decision, specifically with regard to the fact that Hardt and Negri’s enthusiasm for contemporary art is misplaced. The ruling ethos of today’s art world, or so someone wrote to Griffin, can be summed up as: "Theory is bad, political thought in art is wrong, activism is jejune, the free market is good, individualism is great, the amoral artist is genius."

Griffin claims that Hardt and Negri nevertheless prod the art world to revisit itself with the future in mind and indulge in some fanciful imagining. In Hardt and Negri’s view, thinking in the abstract is often more important than dealing with the crude, materialistic realities of the everyday world. In a long essay responding to this argument as laid out in their new book Commonwealth, David Harvey, a radical geographer who teaches at the City University of New York, calls bullshit, bless him.

"Far too many of Hardt and Negri’s proposals remain locked. . . in the realm of immaterial abstraction," Harvey writes, "and, unfortunately, never acquire concrete form." Fast on his way to becoming the pre-eminent Marxist of his generation, Harvey is a theorist who has both feet on the ground. He accuses Hardt and Negri of overlooking the importance of class-based identity and the immiserating machinations of global capitalism. At the same time, Harvey graciously commends Hardt and Negri for highlighting aspects of our contemporary situation others generally overlook.

Harvey’s response is dense, and long -- so long that part of it is relegated to that netherworld at the back of the issue, beyond the reviews. Hardt and Negri’s reply is, thankfully, shorter, and touches briefly on Harvey’s most striking critiques. Overall, you get the sense from both pieces that hidden beneath all the accommodating prose are strong disagreements that would come out in a public debate, but are smoothed over for the glossy page. Still, it is nice to see these impenetrable know-it-alls forced to admit they haven’t got it all figured out: "in some areas in which, as a geographer, he has great expertise. . . he points in directions our arguments could be extended," H&N say of Harvey’s essay.

Props to Griffin for putting this kind of material into an art magazine -- it is almost like reading old issues of Artforum from the ‘70s.

Speaking of the ‘70s Artforum, perhaps the juiciest text actually comes in the letters page, almost lost between all those ads, where venerable critics Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss tell their side of their 1974 departure from the Artforum editorial board to form the art theory journal October. It was, they say, not the result of their disapproval of the famous naked-Lynda Benglis-with-a-dildo ad, as the tale is usually told, but because of the sense of "invasion of editorial policy by commercial fiat" (which is why, they note, October has neither ads nor pictures). Their letter, they say, was inspired by a Roberta Smith review of the "Lynda Benglis/Robert Morris, 1973-74" show at Susan Inglett Gallery. "Since the New York Times has declined to print our letter addressing the inaccuracy, we now turn to the publication where Benglis’s advertisement first appeared in order to set the record, distorted by Smith, straight."

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"L'Affaire Joannou": Art Critics Get Down!

Sharon Butler reports, while offering a thorough linky roundup of what Artnet has branded "L'Affaire Joannou".

 

via Two Coats of Paint, Tuesday, November 17, 2009:

Critic on critic: Jerry Saltz tells DC blogger to get a grip

In a Vulture post about the New Museum's questionable curatorial practices, Saltz assesses the quality of the vociferous debate and courageously suggests that prickly blogger Tyler Green's criticism has crossed the line. "One of the main things that suggested all this indignation had gone too far was the witch-hunt tone of an editorial in the November issue of  Art Newspaper. The language in the piece — written by art blogger Tyler Green and published at the end of last week — was scolding, scornful, condescending, and smug, tinged with a verbal violence that was a little scary. The editorial begins with the false charge that private collector exhibitions are 'fluff shows.' Green sniffs that he’s 'especially disappointed' in the New Museum, and finishes by beseeching all museums to 'cancel' exhibitions of private collections. He demands that the Association of Art Museum Directors “ban” these shows because they are 'an insult' to the art world. When I hear a word like 'ban,' I reach for my dictionary and review the definition of the word democracy.

"This kind of apparatchik rule-making feels off to me. Green has gotten into the habit of demanding that people be fired, reprimanded, or punished, as if only he knows right from wrong. He played a role in getting Grace Glueck fired from the Times for her 'conflict of interest.' After Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune talked about his dual roles as a critic and an employee of an art fair, Green accused him of indulging 'a textbook case of unethical conflict-of-interest' that struck 'at the very heart of ... integrity' and 'flouted journalistic norms.' Green sneered that he was 'troubled' by this behavior and publicly asked the Voice to 'stop publishing' Viveros-Faune. Guess what? That’s exactly what happened. The Voice and the art world lost a tremendous voice....

"I know it’s dangerous to take on bloggers. They can go after you every day, all day long, and anonymous people can chime in, too. Already this week Green has branded me an 'up-with-art cheerleader,' chortled 'balderdash' at something I wrote, and is now even writing comments on my Facebook page and publishing other of my Facebook comments on his public blog. Still, come what may, I’m tired of the hate fest."

In a conciliatory response, Green writes in the Comments thread (and on Saltz's Facebook wall): "I'm proud of the positions I've taken on a range of issues. It is true that I've taken assertive, principled positions on a range of issues. I'd be happy to engage in a dialogue on any of those positions. ...I don't hate you."

Update: On Jerry's Facebook page, Green says the debate isn't about him, it's about the New Museum. Nice guy Ed Winkleman has called for a public debate between Saltz and Green.

Related Links (via Art Observed):
Controversy over New Museum’s plans to show trustee’s collection [The Art Newspaper]
Turning a museum into a vanity space [Tyler Green for The Art Newspaper]
The New Museum responds [The Art Newspaper]
The NuMu ethics story hits the NYT’s front page [Modern Art Notes]
The Met’s director: We’re closer to NuMu than to MoMA [Modern Art Notes]
Saltz: Money, Insularity, and a Huge Controversy for the New Museum [New York Magazine]
Art Morality [New York Magazine]
Some Object as Museum Shows Its Trustee’s Art [NY Times]
The New Museum’s Web of Connections [NY Times]
Museum Directors on Collectors and Exhibitions [NY Times]
The New Museum’s Position on Its Show From a Trustee’s Collection
The Appendix: New Museum Scandal Edition [Artinfo]
NuMu Boo Boo [Time]
New Museum Brouhaha Goes Supernova [Artnet]
New Museum commits suicide with banality [James Wagner]
The November Brooklyn Rail Cover [William Powhida]
New Museum Controversy Grows with its Announced Plans to Show Trustee’s Art [Art Fag City]
Jeff Koons and The Perils of an Unregulated Art World [Art Fag City]
The New York Museum Director Witch Hunt Begins [Art Fag City]
The Authority of the New Museum [Art Market Monitor]

A Call for Copyright Rebellion

 

Image Via

via Inside HigherEd:

A Call for Copyright Rebellion

November 6, 2009

— Steve Kolowich

DENVER -- The manner in which copyright law is being applied to academe in the digital age is destructive to the advancement of human knowledge and culture, and higher education is doing nothing about it.

That is what Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard University law professor and renowned open-access advocate, told a theater of higher ed technologists Thursday at the 2009 Educause Conference here. In his talk, Lessig described how digital and Web technology has exploded the conditions under which copyright law had been written.

“If copyright law, at its core, regulates something called ‘copies,’ then in the analog world… many uses of culture were copyright-free,” he explained. “They didn’t trigger copyright law, because no copy was made. But in the digital world, very few uses are copyright-free because in the digital world … all uses produce a copy.”

The paradigm for copyright law enforcement emerged out of this "analog world" as a way of ensuring authors were remunerated for their contributions to culture, thereby creating an incentive to make further contributions and drive the progress on human art and discovery forward, he said.

Times have since changed, said Lessig, but the letter of the law hasn’t.

Copyright law was originally intended to protect those who create for profit (Lessig used the example of recording artist Britney Spears). But academics also create original works, he said, and they are — or should be — motivated by a desire to advance human knowledge, not line their pockets. Therefore, sealing their work behind copyright barriers does no social good.

“If there’s a business model of science, or a business model of education,” Lessig said, “that depends upon sharing, depends upon sharing resources in common and that builds upon that common set of resources — how does the paradigm case help that business model?”

It does to an extent, Lessig allowed. Absolute open access does weaken the incentive to create insofar as scholars crave some tangible remuneration for their commercially published works. The solution to the problem, he said, probably lies in hybrid systems such as Creative Commons, of which he is a board member. Creative Commons licenses allow authors to designate what portions of their work can be copied and how it may be used, thereby avoiding the “thicket” of the copyright system — where, Lessig said, things are never nearly that simple.

Lessig cited several examples of how copyright law in academe has hampered the pursuit of knowledge: neurologists who were unable to aggregate data for a large-scale brain-mapping project due to copyright restrictions; filmmakers who faced staggering costs re-clearing copyrights on images they used in a civil-rights documentary series when they wanted to release it on DVD. He even recounted a recent incident in which he had been using a medical information Web site to try to diagnose his ill daughter, when he noticed a note that said portions of an article he was reading had been redacted under copyright law.

“What we need to do is to act to avoid this thicket,” he said, “at least where it’s clear this thicket doesn’t give us anything good.”

Academics — presumably stakeholders in the effort to advance knowledge — have been uncharacteristically and disturbingly silent on the copyright “insanity” that has befallen the information trade, Lessig said.

“We should see a resistance to imposing the Britney Spears model of copyright upon the scientist or the educator,” he said. “…But if you would expect that, you would be very disappointed by what we see out there in the scientific and and education communities.” Scholars, he said, have allowed the copyright conversation to be steered by lawyers and businesses who are not first and foremost to intellectual discovery.

To them, Lessig delivered a simple message: “Stop it.”

Go to comments (11) »

KERPLOW! Powhida on Cover of Brooklyn Rail

via MAN:

Artist William Powhida on the NuMu's "suicide"

New York-based artist William Powhida, who frequently satirizes art world figures and conventions in his art, has taken on the New Museum's "suicide" in his latest work.

Excerpted above, Powhida's drawing details "How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality," and includes James Wagner, Lisa Phillips, Marcia Tucker, Jeff Koons, and plenty of others who are somehow engaged in the NuMu's self-injury. You can see the drawing here at Powhida's website (click on it for a high-res image). New Yorkers will see it on the cover of the next Brooklyn Rail.

Barry Schwabsky, On Demand

© THOMAS DEMAND, VG BILD-KUNST, BONN 2009/NEUE NATIONALGALERIE
Thomas Demand exhibit at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

via The Nation:

A Makeshift World: On Thomas Demand

By Barry Schwabsky

This article appears in the November 9, 2009 edition of The Nation.

October 21, 2009

Just as the act of using a computer comes with an implicit advisement--RTM (read the manual) or, less politely, RTFM--so any serious engagement with contemporary art comes with a like directive: RTC (read the catalog).

For many, I know, that practice is more honored in the breach than the observance. Rumor to the contrary, art catalogs are in general clearer and better written than computer manuals, even if they are probably a lot less cogent than they should be. Boris Groys has argued that the fact that no one reads most art commentary, as he calls it, should be taken as one of its great attractions for the writer: "For this very reason one can, in principle, write whatever one wants." I hope it's not quite true that no one reads it, for today one can't simply be a viewer, as we habitually call the addressee of contemporary art. To see a work without a sense of the commentary around it--its linguistic framing--means blinding oneself to where its edges are, to where the work leaves off and reality begins--to the work's position in the world.

All of which amounts to a circuitous admission that my first view of Thomas Demand's exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (on view through January 17) was constrained by my neglect of an important part of its verbal framing--and this despite the fact that there have been few exhibitions of photographs in which writing is so prominently featured, though never in the photographs themselves. And believe me, I did read the texts so prominently and atypically displayed in the gallery--about which more later. They also constitute an important part of the catalog, so this was one instance in which I really did RTC right there in the gallery as I went along, and as one is meant to do. No, what I forgot to do (the purloined-letter syndrome at work, perhaps) was to RTT.

If I had bothered to read the title, I might have been saved the puzzlement I experienced when I wandered downstairs looking for the men's room and passed a bulletin board festooned with local press clippings about the exhibition. Stopping for a quick look, I was bemused by the slant the German papers had given their coverage: it seemed they all saw the show as the artist's meditation on his and their homeland. "Demands Deutschstunde," read the headline in Die Welt. Likewise Die Zeit headed its report "Modell Deutschland" and Der Tagesspiegel, "Deutschland, deine Bühnenbilder" ("Bühnenbilder" means stage scenery, but here it is a play on words: "Bilder" are pictures, images, and Demand's photographs are indeed staged images, albeit without actors). Other publications saved mentioning Germany for the subhead, where it could be conveyed in more than two or three words: "Thomas Demand blickt auf Deutschland" (Berliner Morgenpost); "Die Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin präsentiert Thomas Demands Deutschlandbilder" (Berliner Zeitung). Only as I scanned these articles with my weak German did I cotton on to the fact that Demand's exhibition had a title, cunningly disguised as its location: "Nationalgalerie." This was, I should have understood, Demand's exhibition about or, better yet, of his country.

Demand is sometimes mistaken for a member of the "Becher school," whose best-known members are Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, a group of older German photographers who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Demand, who was born in Munich in 1964, left Düsseldorf (where, studying sculpture, he did not work with the Bechers) in 1992, and in the years since he finished his MA at London's Goldsmiths' College in 1994 he has become one of the world's leading photographers. The Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition follows big shows of his work in London (Serpentine Gallery, 2006) and New York City (Museum of Modern Art, 2005), among others. The monumentally scaled images of the Becher school are typically hyperbolically detailed--their macroscopic dimensions proffering a plethora of microscopic particulars, whether of faces, streetscapes, library interiors or factories. While it has often been noted that the massive size of Becher-school photographs gives them something like the impact of a painting--whereas traditional photographic prints were indeed prints, demanding the kind of intimate engagement suitable to an etching--large-scale Modernist painting, from Matisse to Barnett Newman to Alex Katz, had always favored the elimination of detail. The Becherians, by contrast, multiply details ad infinitum. And though none of them should be taken for mere technicians, the fact remains that in looking at their work one can never be unaware of the technical achievement involved in lending the camera a sort of superhuman eyesight. Their work is often referred to as cold and objective. No wonder, when it seems to lend the human eye the powers of a microscope, even when scanning a distant horizon.

Demand's photographs are nothing like that, despite their equally grand scale. And one would not call him a brilliant photographic technician, which is perhaps not surprising since he came to photography through sculpture. You don't look at his pictures to marvel at his subtle handling of light, incredible control of focus and mastery of tone. In fact, he seems deliberately to cultivate the sense that things are ever so slightly overlit, that just a little bit less of the scene is in perfect focus than might have been possible, that the image could have been rendered with greater crispness and definition. Not that he cultivates the look of the amateur snapshot: nothing seems accidental or haphazard here. But rather than availing himself of the camera's potential for an inhumanly penetrating apprehension of surfaces, he evokes what one might call a normal, technically competent but unfetishized mode of looking. The photographs pretend to be a little less carefully made than they really are.

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New Issue: CULTURAL POLITICS, Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2009

Photo courtesy of Paul Chan, Creative Time and Green Naftali Gallery, New York.

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the publication of CULTURAL POLITICS Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2009, which is a General Issue.

Official Website

Subscribe

Submission Guidleines

Visit Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website: http://culturalpolitics.org

Please feel free to circulate.

Best wishes,

The Editors

+++

Cultural Politics
Volume 5, Issue 3
November 2009

CONTENTS

“Turkish Delight” in Vienna: Art, Islam and European Public Culture
Nilüfer Göle on how the European aesthetic realm becomes a battleground of intercultural and intercivilizational conflicts as well as a domain of borrowings and mixings between ‘native’ and ‘Islamic’ values, thereby creating a transnational public sphere.

Class Struggle and Displacement: Slavoj Žižek and Film Theory
Matthew Flisfeder argues against cognitivist film scholars, such as David Bordwell and David Carroll, and for the relevance of Slavoj Zizek in the field of film criticism and theory. 

Waiting for Godot in New Orleans [check it out @ http://culturalpolitics.org]
New York based artist Paul Chan discusses and illustrates his staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans as a series of site-specific performances and creative response to the city’s ongoing dysfunction and its inhabitants’ collective tenaciousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Recursive Mode: Space, Time and the Hypercommodification of Culture
Robert Hassan argues that ‘evolution’ in the production of mass cultural forms has become stalled in our postmodern, networked, and neoliberalized society, forms that no longer have the space or time to evolve either dialectically in response to capitalism, or organically as newly independent developments. 

Wreck, Restoration and the Work of Carrying On: History on Vivan Sundaram’s Boat-Works
Tania Roy examines the installation artwork of Vivan Sundaram, one of India’s foremost contemporary artists, as an aesthetic response to the rapid political and cultural transformations that marked the 1990s by way of experiments with site-specific, inter-medial installations.

Book Reviews

Can Theory Save Us?
Martin Parker considers Mark Featherstone’s Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought, an intellectual history that runs from Aristotle to Zizek

Reevaluating Greatness in the Time of War
Marek Bartelik analyses Aaron J. Cohen’s Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917, a history of Russian art prior to the October Revolution.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

About Cultural Politics
“Cultural Politics is a welcome and innovative addition.  In an academic universe already well populated with journals, it is carving out its own unique place—broad and a bit quirky.  It likes to leap between the theoretical and the concrete, so that it is never boring and often filled with illuminating glimpses into the intellectual and cultural worlds.” Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, USA.

 

Robert Storr on Art + Theory

Image Via

via The Art Newspaper:

Robert Storr: Most theory has little bearing on art

The critic and curator speaks to The Art Newspaper

By Helen Stoilas | From Frieze daily edition, 16 Oct 09
Published online 16 Oct 09

Robert Storr, US critic, curator and dean of the Yale School of Art, is visiting Frieze Art Fair for the first time, to take part in “Scenes from a Marriage: Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?”, a panel discussion today at 12pm with artist Barbara Bloom and philosophy professor Simon Critchley. He spoke to The Art Newspaper about the role of art theory, and what advice he is giving to his students in today’s artistic climate.

The Art Newspaper: The topic of the Frieze panel is “Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?” What are your thoughts?

Robert Storr: I’m not sure that art and theory were ever that close to begin with. There are some artists who read theory seriously but not all that many. And some of the theoretical writing that was done about artists was very important, but what people now call theory is a vast field and a relatively small amount of it bears directly on art, or at least on art production.

We’re in a very strange situation where some artists have derived a lot from their theoretical reading but never as systematically as people are inclined to think. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who I know read theory carefully, nonetheless made a point of saying that it was not to be read in a kind of rigorous, academic way, but to help unblock thoughts and open up questions.

A lot of artists don’t want to tip their hands and show how selective and shallow their understanding is; a lot of people who do theory full time don’t really want to acknowledge that the process of making art is fundamentally different from the process of writing theory. And, therefore, even though you may share a vocabulary, you don’t share at all the same kind of generative process or goals.

TAN: What do you think the future of art theory is?

RS: I think the future of all kinds of philosophical discourse depends on their utility, their accuracy and description. Having been partially educated in France I was aware that a lot of French theory is conditioned by specifically French situations. The decline of a unified left in French politics, the death of existentialism as a movement…those terms are not applicable to America in a direct way, so you can read French theory in an American context but you also ought to read American history to counterbalance it. Thirty years ago everyone read Wittgenstein—how many read him today? If you want to talk about Jasper Johns, if you want to talk about Bruce Nauman, you should read Wittgenstein. People who have real theoretical minds read widely, they read selectively and they read for use.

TAN: Are there any new projects you’re working on?

RS: I am finishing a new Gerhard Richter book on a painting he’s giving to MoMA about 9/11, and I’ve finished at long last my big book on Louise Bourgeois. I’m running an art school and I’m trying to give good and reasonable criticism to young artists who are entering into an art world not at all like the one they imagined.

TAN: What kind of advice are you giving art students now?

RS: I’m telling them that this is actually a fine time to be in art school because, when I was in art school, when a lot of people I admire were in art school in the 1960s and 1970s, there was no money. If you go into it knowing that you will probably not be rewarded lavishly, but you can in fact continue to work, you’re on a much better footing than if you go into it trying to make a huge impact when you’re 23 or 24, and then maintain that for the next 60 years. You know John Baldessari is someone whom everyone admires, but people by and large forget that he destroyed all of his “successful work” and started all over again. I’m interested in people who make good art, whenever they make it, and I think a lot of the best artists today are late bloomers. I’m a big fan of both Raoul De Keyser and Tom Nozkowski, who I put in the Venice Biennale [2007]. Tom is 65 and Raoul is 78 and neither one of them really hit it until they were way past the age when most people think it would be the end of your career.

TAN: Maybe there’s less of a focus on the cult of youth.

RS: There isn’t less of a focus yet, but it’s going to dawn on people that it’s not working. It’s always nice to be a coming attraction, but it’s murder to be a has-been. If it hasn’t happened for you yet, you can at least console yourself with the idea that it might. It’s a fashionable world and even good artists go out of fashion. If you’ve never really thought about what you’re going to do when you go out of fashion because you’ve never been out of fashion, it’s much harder to take than if you’ve gradually come into your own, gotten through difficult times and know that you can survive.

TAN: Do you think the recent economic problems will make artists stronger?

RS: I’m not a believer that hardship makes people stronger, but I do think that too much of certain things can make them weaker. Strong people can be distracted by things that come too easy. Maintaining a career nowadays is extraordinarily complicated, even if you’re just doing your work and showing up for required occasions. You can waste an amazing amount of energy, time and goodwill by chasing after stuff that’s not worth chasing after. Really wise artists know how to make dramatic appearances and how to make dramatic disappearances.

Rachel Maddow: Our Current Derangement

About the Nobel Prize and Obama, and the haters on both sides; posted on DailyKos.