Curated From Within: the Artist as Curator
Artists invented what we now understand as modern curating. The various avant-gardes established types of display that fundamentally changed what was possible in an exhibition context. Their efforts were later echoed by other practices of independent artist-run spaces, also known as “artist-run initiatives,” that drew curating close to interventionist and activist intentions.
In Brief: The Future of Art Schools etc.
There are two principal challenges facing art schools today. Both pertain to the decades-long impact of neoliberalism.
Another Place After Another
The exhibition ‘Transplant’ was conceived as a collaboration between the independent artist space KNULP in Sydney and Sydney College of the Arts gallery at the University of Sydney. Part of the underlying though not explicit mandate of the exhibition, was to highlight the seminal role independent art spaces play in the creation and critique of contemporary culture locally and around the world.
From Pillar to Post
This exhibition addressed the unique physical peculiarities of the ageing colonial-era architecture in which it occurred. Its title, ‘Pillar to Post’ suggested the degree to which contemporary life is evermore at the whim of external forces that propel us from one space to another. We move more frequently than ever from one place to another, from one situation to another, willingly or not.
Here and Nowhere: Artistic Identity on Social Media
Social media is a dominant force in contemporary art and culture. Social media attempts to incorporate everything into it. Its underlying consensus is of sharing all with all at all times. The unprecedented popularity of social media among artists suggests they have finally escaped their traditional identity as alienated individuals. Or have they?
Barbarians at the Gates: Corporate Art Institutions Against the ‘People’
The world of global art institutions is based, at least in theory, on the capacity to adequately represent liberal ‘free-spirited’ contemporary artists. Yet what does it mean when apparently progressive art is exhibited in the same high-profile international museums that largely relegate women and artists of non-Western heritages to silence and invisibility?
Art and Celebrity: the Quest for Ultravisibilty
Controversy surrounding Björk’s recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art raises a number of questions about the role of major art institutions in the 21st Century. These questions go far beyond fusty reactions over a pop star exhibiting in the hallowed halls of a high-end museum. Instead they indicate a broader crisis of identity for public art institutions beset by neoliberalism’s privatising demands for ever-greater profits.
Art and the Politics of Withdrawal
The controversy surrounding founding Biennale of Sydney corporate sponsor Transfield, and its simultaneous operation of refugee detention centres, raises much broader issues. At first glance, could there be anything more diametrically opposed than a multi-national corporation capitalising on human suffering and a mass cultural event implicitly believed to democratically celebrate global difference?
Something in the Air: Internet Art as Archive and Strategy Beyond the Gates of the Museum
Internet art’s seeming peripherality to the greater art world is uncanny when the internet has so radically altered the ways in which anyone with access to such technology, views both art and the world generally. Meanwhile, the virtualisation of Capital, labour, art and culture, is far more pervasive, far less obvious and far more insidious than simple ‘VR’ technology would suggest.
Sweeping Art Under the Market
Critical art writing bemoaning a fundamental ‘crisis’ in contemporary art is by no means new. In fact, since the 1980s such writing has become commonplace. A recent article by Camille Paglia extrapolating such a crisis called ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’ appeared, fittingly enough, in the Wall Street Journal. How exactly capitalism can save art however is by no means convincingly argued.
Artist Run = Emerging: A Bad Equation
If one were to take seriously the autonomy suggested by the term ‘artist-run’, then the assumed natural dominance and superior expertise of many other professional players in the so-called culture industry, would be called into question.
Plenty of Nothing; Art/Money/Installation
Even today, installation art, properly defined by its dependency on site and its irreducibility to isolable components, poses especial challenges. Never is this truer than when the installation art in question appears to exhibit ‘nothing’. In a global climate founded squarely on reinvigorated traditionalist principles of material accumulation, contemporary installations in which ‘nothing’ is exhibited pose important questions concerning art’s value.
New Worlds Inc. the Global Museum Franchise
A new cultural district in Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, incorporates new lavish outposts of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums. These particular ‘outposts’ will feature specially designed buildings by high-ranking glitterati of the international architecture firmament, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel. The resulting ‘utopia’ is of a kind that only the conjoined cooperation of global multinationals could conjure.
To produce value under Capital is a misfortune because it means producing value for somebody else.