by Jon Lackman | 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? The panel provided few answers to such questions, focusing more on personal practices than on social and institutional structures. Some panelists claimed that the slash of art historian/critic, as a professional role, carries a certain degree of ambivalence, which this reporter interprets more as an embarrassment of riches. There seemed to be a shared notion that somewhere in this zone of the slash – between history and criticism – lies the essence of post-post-modern art writing. Clement Greenberg earned nary a mention, while Rosalind Krauss and Susan Sontag were deemed good models. If the panelists here (with Lawrence Weschler excluding himself from consideration as a mere amateur and dabbler) are the exemplars of a new generation, then their critical concerns, fixed between 1960 and 1985, seem both narrower than those of the foregoing generation and more sensitive, particularly to the ethics and responsibilities of writing criticism and art history in the contemporary marketplace.”
