by Jon Lackman | 19 February 2007 | Conferences, Contemporary
Blogger Paddy Johnson writes: “If you like discourse about the ‘aesthetic criteria of compression’ or ‘virtuality as the ontology of art’, then this conference will suit you well. The quotes are two of the more comprehensible phrases I managed to glean out the session Virtualities: Contemporary Art between Fact and Fiction, with star panelists David Joselit of Yale University, Vered Maimon of Columbia University, Tim Griffin editor of Artforum International magazine, Mark Godfrey of Slade School of Fine Art and Hannah Feldman of Northwestern University. Not that these positions mean much of anything if the majority of papers presented litter attendees ears with impenetrable academic jargon. David Joselit and Tim Griffin proved to be the two exceptions to this problem, and though their essays were not providing particularly ground breaking information, I thought they were well thought out, and clear. Vered Maimon on the other hand, presented writing so dense it was very difficult to know what she was saying. It did not however escape me that she managed to give an entire talk on Walid Raad and The Atlas Group, an archive of fictional Lebanese war documents without mentioning the fact that Raad casts a Lebanese film star in The Bachar Tapes, a video that poses as the translated diary of an arab prisoner who apparently sports a ridiculously fake accent. The fact that the entire country of Lebanon is in on that joke while we aren’t would seem to be a fairly significant content point in the work particularly on a panel titled Between Fact and Fiction … A Faustian Bargain: Emerging Artists, Critics, and the Market, hosted dealer Jeffrey Deitch, collectors Mera and Don Rubell, and critics Peter Plagens and Jerry Saltz … About mid way through the session, the dealer [Deitch] explained that the rise of importance of auction houses has meant the creation of an art history canon dictated almost wholly by the market. Backing this sentiment up, he pointed out that the limitations of the contemporary evening sales are such that the work of roughly ten artists from every decade are available for purchase, and that that the dominance of these corporations means that that those ten practitioners have come to represent the most important figures of their time … Jerry Saltz offered a number witty remarks, most notably his response to Jeffrey Deitch’s assertion that critics need to do more. ‘I agree,’ said Saltz, ‘though sometimes I feel like a Democrat being asked whether I have a plan to get out of Iraq.’” [Ed: spelling slightly improved here for ease of reading]
