by Jon Lackman | 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 critical contemplation, imaginative experimentation, and politicization cannot be dismissed … Rather than flatly dismiss art’s gallery-bound political ambitions as a trap, we must instead interrogate the very complexity of the situation … Against the caricature of the art institution as a mere commercial enterprise, we need to avoid the economic determinism that positions art as a passive effect of its patronage and reduces the meaning of aesthetics to an automatic function of its commercial context … Such facile identifications and binaries suggest precisely the kind of “partition of the sensible” of which Rancière speaks, “a distribution of the places and of the capacities or the incapacities attached to those places” that amount to so many “allegories of inequality.”
Forthcoming in Grey Room: “Ask Jeeves: Servants as Search Engines”
