18 April 2011 | Americas, Books, Contemporary
In her new book “Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art,” Katy Siegel examines artists’ “preoccupations with issues of race, mass culture, the individual, suburbia, apocalypse, and nuclear destruction” — noting that “while a leading textbook like Art Since 1900, for instance, assumes that the most important art is American or European, those [...]
15 April 2011 | Asia, Contemporary, Current Events
As the Chinese government’s detention of artist Ai Weiwei approaches the two-week mark, ArtInfo.com brings together the latest developments. Ai was arrested in Beijing on April 3, an event his studio assistants recorded on Twitter (translation here). Evan Osnos reported on the day’s events in a New Yorker dispatch. Police claim that Ai is being investigated [...]
16 December 2010 | Awards, Contemporary
Sounds like a fascinating piece to me, no pun intended. You can read about it here. An interesting conversation which seems to growing from this selection is the question of pushing the definition of art. Sarah Lyall writes in the above NYT article: “The Turner Prize, awarded annually to a British artist 50 or younger, [...]
8 December 2010 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Journals
The African art journal Nka celebrated its adoption by Duke University Press by engaging 15 scholars and critics in a debate in print (issue 26) and online over “contemporary African art history and the state of the scholarship.” Editor Salah M. Hassan expresses a certain pessimism of his own about “the political and economic crises [...]
12 November 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary, Museums
At the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Jorge Luis Marzo and Tere Badia have put together an exhibition and catalogue titled “THE BAROQUE (D)EF(F)ECT: Politics of the Hispanic Image,” a deconstruction of the words “Baroque” and “Hispanic” and their implication that there is a “homogeneous framework shared by Spain and Latin America”: [W]ho built [...]
29 October 2010 | Books, Contemporary
In her new book The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art Wendy Steiner posits that the modernist “ ‘separate sphere of the aesthetic’ has become indistinguishable from normal life … [W]e gingerly negotiate a real-virtual divide that we suspect no longer exists.” To illuminate this new world, she examines models and [...]
25 October 2010 | Books, Contemporary
We noted in 2007 the debut of “Documents of Contemporary Art,” a series of books that collect writings on individual themes. The latest volume to appear is Failure, edited by Lisa Le Feuvre, which announces, “Amidst current global uncertainty failure has become a central subject of investigation in recent art … Here success is deemed [...]
18 September 2010 | Africa, Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
Recently in the papers: Kaelen Wilson Goldie on Routes d’Arabie at the Louvre (The National) On Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art from Ancient Nigeria, previously in Santander, Madrid and London, now in Houston, and later in Indianapolis, Richmond and New York: Douglas Britt (Houston Chronicle); The Economist; Itziar Reyero (ABC.es); Richard Dorment (The Telegraph); Jonathan [...]
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 [...]
