15 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Dave Hickey’s indispensable essay collection The Invisible Dragon is finally back in print. From the press release: The Invisible Dragon, originally published in 1993, is often regarded as art critic Dave Hickey’s seminal work. Hailed by artists, the book made a forceful case for beauty in a time when the notion was completely dismissed by [...]
9 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, art historian Horst Bredekamp discusses Abu Ghraib, Bush, Sept. 11, the case of the Bulgarian art historian Martina Baleva, Darwin, Abraham Bosse, The Matrix, and more: Le Brun’s contemporary Abraham Bosse taught perspective at the Paris Academy. He was let go because he took it too literally. In [...]
5 January 2009 | Contemporary
From Artinfo: Alanna Heiss, the founder of P.S.1 contemporary art center, is retiring from her position as the center’s director, the New York Press reports. Heiss founded P.S.1 in 1976 as a space for large-scale visual and performing artworks by established and emerging artists; the center merged with the Museum of Modern Art in 2000. [...]
5 May 2008 | Contemporary
From The Art Newspaper: One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died … [Curator Paola] Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, [...]
19 March 2008 | Contemporary
In the Winter 2007 Art Journal, Andrea D. Fitzpatrick writes on “The Movement of Vulnerability: Images of Falling and September 11″: Are those who fell to their deaths on September 11, 2001, exploited or honored by the display of images representing their experiences? … images of falling are not new to photojournalism or contemporary art [...]
11 February 2008 | Contemporary, Museums
What percentage of art museum collections are on display at any time? If the percentage is too small, should the art travel more so that it can be seen? What about the risk to the works? According to the New York Times, Eli Broad recently made the surprising decision not to give his contemporary-art collection [...]
16 January 2008 | Contemporary
When artists fail as marketers, their marketing becomes art that’s easy to market.
11 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary, Modern
Partha Mitter, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex, has recently published The Triumph Of Modernism: India’s Artists And The Avant-garde, 1922-1947. One interviewer notes that He has earlier published Art And Nationalism In Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994) and Much Maligned Monsters: A History Of European Reactions To Indian Art (1977). He [...]
7 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary
When every inch of every building is covered in posters, and the posters change daily, how do you find your way home? In a recent issue of South Asian Popular Culture (5:1), Iftikhar Dadi writes on “Political Posters in Karachi: 1988-1999.” During this time, “Pakistan attempted to ‘return’ to parliamentary democracy.” Consequently, the existence of [...]
26 October 2007 | Asia, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Art India, Beth Citron reports on “Elective Affinities, Constitutive Differences: Contemporary Art in Asia,” a three-day seminar held in Delhi in March “to motivate dialogue on a potential Delhi Biennale”: Introductions by Parul Dave Mukherji and Geeta Kapur reflected on Edward Said’s Orientalism, with Mukherji emphasizing the need to critically [...]
24 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary
More interesting items on contemporary African art. A recent issue (n. 69) of Africultures is entitled “Les cultures africaines sont-elles à vendre? Richesses artistiques et développement économique.” Its contents are drawn largely from the proceedings of an October 2006 symposium “Maintenant l’Afrique!” held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In “Diffusion et marché: l’art africain [...]
8 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary, Museums
An extended review by Elizabeth Harney in the Summer 2007 Art Journal offers an opportunity to help fill in the gap left by CAA’s recent abortive attempt at a discussion of the ethical issues involved in the collecting and exhibition of contemporary African art. We apologize for quoting at this length from Harney’s review, but [...]
7 June 2007 | Americas, Contemporary
We recently received the book Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, edited by artist Sam Durant, with contributions from Danny Glover, Amiri Baraka, Kathleen Cleaver, St. Clair Bourne, Colette Gaiter, and Greg Morozumi. Durant writes in his introduction, “Many of the images in this book may shock viewers coming to them for the [...]
27 April 2007 | Books, Contemporary
At least one prominent art historian believes that “our leading sculptor, male or female, in the United States today is by all odds Louise Bourgeois.” We read that “In October 2007 Tate Modern presents the first major survey since 1995 of the work of the French-born artist Louise Bourgeois.” (According to Artnet, the show will [...]
26 April 2007 | Contemporary, Journals
From the College Art Association press release: “Kotz is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and an affiliate member of the Graduate Faculty in Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities … Kotz received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University in 2002, with a dissertation [...]
23 April 2007 | Contemporary
From The New York Times: “Roy Moyer … died on April 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85 … Mr. Moyer was a longtime administrator at the American Federation of Arts, which organizes exhibitions for travel across America … Among the shows he helped create was ‘Art and the Found Object,’ which included [...]
11 April 2007 | Contemporary, Theory
Caroline A. Jones reviews David Joselit’s new book Feedback: Television Against Democracy in Artforum: “The field of art history registered a seismic shift in the late 1990s, when crops of grad students began to designate ‘video art’ as a topic for their oral exams, or even to write their dissertations on the formerly bereft genre.” [...]
4 April 2007 | Asia, Contemporary
In the Dec. 2006 issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Paul Gladston writes: “The publication of Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, by Karen Smith, a British-born art critic and a longtime resident of China with extensive firsthand knowledge of the contemporary Chinese art world, is … an extremely [...]
30 March 2007 | Contemporary
The latest issue of Third Text includes an essay by Laura Mulvey on Kiarostami that is excerpted from her recent book, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image: “Digital technology does not imply an inherent, teleological development from the old to the new, but rather varied opportunities and possibilities reminiscent of the now [...]
28 March 2007 | Conferences, Contemporary
Contributor Daniel Belasco reports from “Writing the Contemporary: Art History and Art Criticism,” last night’s CUNY Graduate Center panel, moderated by Katy Siegel and including Johanna Burton, Branden Joseph, Scott Rothkopf, and Lawrence Weschler: “What’s the difference between, say, a monograph on Cindy Sherman and a long exhibition review of the same artist in Artforum? [...]
