by Jon Lackman | 24 February 2006 | Conferences
Contributor Daniel Belasco writes: “Your correspondent arrived in foggy Boston Thursday afternoon to dance the old academic-conference two-step, which never seems to go out of style. Normal rules of decorum are suspended at such an overwhelming concentration of brains, images, and schmooze unleavened by free-flowing coffee. One has to be shameless about barging through closed doors and exiting in the midst of someone’s earnestly honed disquisition. First stop was a panel updating a postmodern and feminist standby, ‘Before and After Institutional Critique.’ William Kaizen deployed Gregory Bateson’s theories of the ecological structure of the self as a new method to read the video work of Dan Graham. Julia Bryan-Wilson, in assessing the use and abuse of the comparison of art work to sex work in 1970s art criticism, made the day’s best left-field reference, to a Woody Allen short story, ‘The Whore of Mensa,’ about a man who pays women to talk wonky to him (‘I mean my wife is great, don’t get me wrong. But she won’t discuss Pound with me’).
Thereafter, I jetted to catch the second half of ‘Jackson Pollock’s Afterlife’ in one of the ballrooms. Ellen Landau weighed in on the disputed Pollocks. ‘If they are not Pollocks, then they are the most amazing fakes in modern art history,’ Landau concluded. Taking a step back, Peggy Phelan called for an end to the Rosenbergian interpretation of Pollock’s paintings as ‘act,’ and asked that we instead consider them as ‘event,’ in the Deleuzian sense of an infinite moment that continues through repetition. Breathless, I returned to the first panel in time to catch the tail end of Rhea Anastas’ sexless enumeration of the financial details of Andrea Fraser’s sex tape ‘Untitled’ (2002-2005). In the Q&A, Bryan-Wilson and Anastas sparred over whether prostitution is an important part of the meaning of Fraser’s intercourse with a patron, to oversimplify their complex arguments. Another question went unasked: if artists and critics are whores for the marketplace, then what does that make bloggers at art history conferences?”
