The public letter criticizes “an art world that upholds inherited power structures at the cost of ethical behavior.”
Artforum
Posted inIn Brief
A Week of Chaos at Artforum Magazine Following Sexual Harassment Allegations
One of the magazine’s longtime publishers, Knight Landesman, resigned after a string of sexual harassment allegations were made public this week.
Posted inArt
Painting Artforum, Cover to Cover
DENVER — With each passing decade, the images and advertisements in the monthly art magazine Artforum slowly shifted from black and white to color.
Posted inArt
Why Lucy Lippard Never Gets Writer’s Block
A packed house received Lucy Lippard for a wry lecture about her life as an arts writer at the New School on Wednesday, October 30. Staff from the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, which co-sponsored the event, stood leaning against the wall. Students sat on the floor.
Posted inOpinion
Let’s All Argue About Digital Art
You’re digital! I’m digital! We’re all digital! No better way to stir the pot than to bring up the post-IRL condition that has us all confused: What does it mean that we spend so much time online? How are artists engaging technology? Everyone’s arguing, from the curmudgeonly Artforum-approved art historian Claire Bishop to curator Lauren Cornell and author Eleanor Heartney. Here’s what they’re saying.
Posted inArt
What’s Wrong With Technological Art vs. the Maker Faire
“What’s Wrong With Technological Art?” was the vexing question posed by the tony New Museum panel assembled by Megan Heuer featuring Heather Corcoran, the new executive director of Rhizome, and art historians Judith Rodenbeck, and Gloria Sutton. The event indadvertedly dove tailed with the recent September Artforum issue about the frayed divide between the art world and technological art. The bon mot award for the evening came from rehashing the 1967 quote of Philip Leider, editor of Artforum, who once penned the uber snarky statement, “I can’t imagine Artforum ever doing a special issue on electronics or computers in art, but one never knows.”
Posted inOpinion
Do Artists Actually Confront Our New Technological Reality?
Art historian and associate professor at New York’s CUNY Graduate Center Claire Bishop has taken to the pages of Artforum’s September edition to issue a kind of rebuke for contemporary art. She argues, in an extended essay that only briefly detours into egregious artspeak, that though the new realities of technology and the internet provide the fundamental context for art currently being made, art and artists have failed to critically confront this context and are too content simply to respond and adapt to it.
Posted inOpinion
Before Occupy Wall Street, Artforum Remembers There Was Asco
Usually associated with long-winded art historical articles and page after page of gallery ads, Artforum made an unexpected but exciting move in their October issue by placing Asco, a politically radical Chicano artist collective from the 1970s on the cover. Perhaps igniting a real art historical interest in Asco, Artforum highlights Asco’s merging of art and protest, which could directly inspire Occupy Wall Street (and now, other cities)’s own art and culture committee.
Posted inArt
A Populist Attack on the Art World Pulls Punches
According to Eric Doeringer, the artist-curator of I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me, the exhibition’s title—a nod to Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance “I Like America and America Likes Me”—is meant to convey the “fraught relationship between emerging artists and the art-world establishment,” one marked by a simultaneous desire to criticize the art world’s excesses and to be recognized by it. Art about the institutions of art, both physical and discursive, is hardly a new phenomenon, but unlike Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke, cited by Doeringer as predecessors for the work included in this exhibition, what emerges most clearly here is not “institutional critique” but a sense of anxiety or anger about the artists’ own marginalization and lack of mainstream success.
Posted inArt
Best of the Aughts: The 11 Best Headlines for a Delusional Decade
We were recently deleting our hard drives from the aughts in an effort to upload everything into the cloud and we found these gems among the files. We almost forgot these things happened … oh wait, did they? Who remembers.
