19 August 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
The newspaper Nigerian Compass interviews Okwui Enwezor, who is visiting Nigeria for the first time in 8 years. It appears to ask about Sylvester Ogbechie’s recent indictment of his curatorial practice: But how would you say your work has contributed to the the global discourse in art and in changing the general feeling about African [...]
17 August 2010 | Books, Contemporary, Journals
Caa.reviews has started reviewing artists’ books recently. (If this started earlier, I must have missed it.) Clifton Meador (who in February reviewed a book about artists’ books) writes on The Square by Emily McVarish: Emily McVarish is one of a handful of artists whose primary artistic output takes the form of books, books that she [...]
5 August 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
Last February, a conference convened to discuss the “Art History of Games.” This February, a CAA session will address “Cel-Culture: The Hybrid Intersections of Art, Video Games, and Manga.” And now on view in Paris is “MuseoGames: Une Histoire à Rejouer” (“MuseoGames: A Story to be Replayed”), as ARTINFO reports: This multimedia exhibition chronicles three [...]
3 August 2010 | Books, Contemporary
Rosalyn Deutsche’s new book Hiroshima after Iraq (based on her Wellek Library Lectures) examines three contemporary video works whose subject is the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Its press release announces that Deutsche “reveals the passive collusion between leftist critique and dominant discourse in which personal dimensions of war are denied.” In her introduction, she [...]
29 July 2010 | Contemporary
On The Huffington Post, Daniel Grant writes: For some time, the ground has been shifting, moving the line between what is and is not considered acceptable for artists to pay for … Critics, museum curators and art historians regularly are approached by artists to write catalogue essays; for some of them, it is a lucrative [...]
27 July 2010 | Contemporary
From The Moscow News, an update to the story of the censored curators: Moscow’s Tagansky District Court convicted prominent museum curators Yury Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev of “inciting hatred and denigrating human dignity” by staging a controversial art exhibit – but allowed them to avoid a jail term, ordering them instead to pay 350,000 roubles [...]
23 July 2010 | Contemporary, Modern, Museums
In the Financial Times, Rachel Spence praises the little known exhibition “Russias! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary,” now in its final days in Venice: As the 1930s unrolled in a psychotic rollercoaster of purges and famines, Stalin bullied artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians into making work that supported the fantasy that this was the best [...]
20 July 2010 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Museums
Tolu Ogunlesi’s review of Art Basel alerted me to a recent provocative essay by professor and Aachron Editions publisher Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “The Curator as Culture Broker (A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art),” which he recently presented at a UC-Santa Cruz conference The Task of [...]
8 July 2010 | Architecture, Contemporary, Museums
The Winter 2010 issue of Critical Inquiry is gripping, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention. Editor W.J.T. Mitchell gives the background in his introduction: In the spring of 2009, Critical Inquiry received an article from [UCLA English and comparative literature professor] Saree Makdisi critiquing the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation’s proposed Museum of Tolerance in [...]
22 June 2010 | Contemporary, Theory
In an article in the Dec. ’09 journal of visual culture (8:3), “Apart from Sex,” Adrian Rifkin writes: “[Andres] Serrano’s dildo picture reminds of Butler’s Derridian theses of the origin-like quality of the copy, insofar as it is quite impossible to figure the boy’s penis without his a priori penetration by the rubber or silicone [...]
17 June 2010 | Contemporary
In a recent issue of October (n. 130), thirty-two contributors responded to a questionnaire on “The Contemporary” written by Hal Foster: [M]uch present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment … At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, ‘contemporary art’ has become an institutional object in its own right: in [...]
15 June 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Nka (n. 25), editor Salah M. Hassan writes: In gesturing toward a theoretical framework with which to comprehend the breadth and depth of the work of this generation of African diaspora artists, several art critics have referred to them as “Afropolitans,” which could serve to embody a sense of cosmpolitanism [...]
4 June 2010 | Contemporary
Last night the Dallas Museum of Art presented a talk with Luc Tuymans. The DMA recently opened the first US retrospective of the artist (organized by the Wexner and SFMOMA). I enjoy how the subdued palette of his work combined with the paintings’ subject matter produces a feeling that lingers, or haunts the viewer (like [...]
6 May 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
A few people have already commented on Cy Twombly’s recently unveiled ceiling for the Louvre (here and here) – including one technically detailed letter that reveals a significant part of it was painted by a professor of art history! Last night art historians Alex Potts (who has a forthcoming book on post-war art) and Richard [...]
4 May 2010 | Contemporary, Journals
In a recent issue of Grey Room (n. 37), T.J. Demos writes …. In the journal October, art historian and critic David Joselit raises the seeming contradiction of discovering art that is critical toward consumerism in the very site of the commercial art gallery … [However] the potential of the gallery as a site of [...]
24 April 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
Neo Rauch, central figure in the so-called Leipzig School of German painting, observes his fiftieth birthday with a double retrospective in Leipzig and Munich. The catalog is from Hatje Cantz.
21 April 2010 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Prompted by the opening of Les Promesses du Passé at the Centre Pompidou, some recent work on post-Wall “Eastern European” art (one of the tenets of the exhibition is to demonstrate the irrelevance of this term in light of the polyphony of voices; the exhibition layout is designed to be discontinuous, accordingly): Transitland is a [...]
19 April 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
With the integration of technology and electronic media in art, new issues in contemporary art continue to arise. A recent encounter with such type art has raised a particular question for me. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth currently has on view a FOCUS show of American-born artist Ben Jones: Jones’ work investigates new methods [...]
16 April 2010 | Contemporary
In the spring 2010 issue of X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly, Damon Willick writes a memorial to the art historian Henry T. Hopkins (1928-2009): In 1960, Hopkins directed the Huysman Gallery, which was across the street from the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega. Though Huysman’s history was brief, the gallery offered an alternative to the dominant Ferus Gallery [...]
14 April 2010 | Career, Contemporary
In a recent issue of American Art (23:3), Joshua Shannon writes that the field of contemporary art history is now producing more job openings than “Nineteenth-Century Art and the Art of the United States combined – the two boom fields of a generation ago,” but that it is also changing rapidly. For starters, its center [...]
