Cooper Union is not reeling in the wake of today’s historic board announcement, but it is hurting. The beleaguered institution’s decision to scrap its founder’s vision for free education was a long time coming, borne on the back of a boom-time cupidity that has crippled many university endowments. This evening, Hyperallergic sought to get a feel for the student reaction and the way forward.
Mostafa Heddaya
Mostafa Heddaya is the former managing editor of Hyperallergic.
Posted inNews
ArtPrize Gains New Executive Director
ArtPrize announced today the hiring of a new executive director, Christian Gaines. We spoke to Gaines, whose background is in film festival management, to discuss his plans for the organization, host to one of the largest contemporary art prizes in the world.
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Labor Issues in Spotlight as Frieze NY Prepares for May Art Fair [UPDATE]
New York City councilmembers and labor leaders, united under the auspices of Teamsters Joint Council 16, gave a press conference on the steps of City Hall yesterday, again blasting the use of non-union labor for Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island.
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In Wake of Tragedy, Boston’s Art Museums Free Today
This morning, as Boston mourned yesterday’s tragedy, its major art institutions announced free admission to the public, “a place of respite for our community” in the words of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Posted inArt
When Artspeak Masks Oppression
“Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?” So asks online art publication Triple Canopy’s widely circulated essay “International Art English,” in which the authors catalogued the death of meaning in the language of contemporary art. It’s a perceptive study, though after offering a half-alternative (“the elite … will opt for something like conventional highbrow English”). the article ends in media res with a sarcastic shrug: an evocative morsel of IAE — a press release — reformatted into a prose poem.
By so abstracting their position into parody, the authors misread the most significant consequence of this new language, loosed upon a world in which prisoners of conscience languish in the jails of the world’s emerging contemporary art superpowers. The unsurprising reality is that a specialized language fraught with euphemism and obfuscation is better known as propaganda.
