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“The idea behind Donnerstag was to insist on the difference between good art and bad art. I am aware of how anachronistic that sounds and how quickly it evokes the image of an old critic-pontiff wagging his authoritarian pointer finger. But even that image is founded in a misunderstanding: the caricaturesque exaggeration of the critic's voice as dictatorial. But it's really nothing more than that very voice. And it pronounces a judgment that is not juridical, but ideally worth nothing more than the argument at its core. It's far more authoritarian and antidemocratic to deny a public voice the act of judgment and concede to a postheroically styled art writer nothing more than the task of po...
In the artistic activities of Philippe Thomas (1951-1995), there was a determination to disappear: it was his procedure to transfer his title of author onto his collectors. This was the case when selling an artwork, or whenever the author's credit was needed for a commissioned text, and in the institutional co-operations that Thomas was a participant of. With this strategy Thomas worked against his own historicization, erasing his name from the reigning European and North American art fields and with prescience Thomas "put up obstacles to block his future 'googleability'" (Hanna Magauer). In recent years, the works and writings of the artist, who also acted on behalf of the semi-fictional ag...
The New York gallery American Fine Arts, Co.—whose name today is largely synonymous with that of its gallerist, Colin de Land (1955–2003)—represents a gallery practice in which a decided deviation from conventional models overlaps with successful activities within the framework of the art market. Today, American Fine Arts, Co. and de Land figure as uncontested projection screens for the desire for independence from or bohemian resistance against the dictate of the market. Particularly in retrospect, a consistent image of the gallery is not discernible. Faced with the obvious risk of romanticization, it appears all the more important to pursue an understanding of how American Fine Arts,...
After his studies at the arts academies in Berlin and Düsseldorf, Ull Hohn (1960-1995) moved to New York to attend the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1987. Engaging with current theoretical debates and cultural issues, his work from the late 1980s and early 1990s frequently invokes questions of gender and homosexuality, as well as their representation. It interrogates the history of painting, traditional notions of virtuosity, the conventions of value and taste inherent to education, and the distinction between high and popular culture. Ull Hohn: Foregrounds, Distances aims not only to offer the first comprehensive overview of his work, but also to contribute to a history of painting-based practices, which occupy a marginal place in the established narratives of the art of the 1980s and 1990s. Published in collaboration with Galerie Neu and the Estate of Ull Hohn Contributors Tom Burr, Thomas Eggerer, Manfred Hermes, Hannes Loichinger, Fionn Meade, Magnus Schaefer, Megan Francis Sullivan, Lanka Tattersall, Alexis Vaillant
There is a category of choreographic practice with a lineage stretching back to mid-20th century North America that has re-emerged since the early 1990s: dance as a contemporary art medium. Such work belongs as much to the gallery as does video art or sculpture and is distinct from both performance art and its history as well as from theater-based dance. The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art clarifies the continuities and differences between the second-wave dance avant-garde in the 1950s‒1970s and the third-wave starting in the 1990s. Through close readings of key artists such as Maria Hassabi, Sarah Michelson, Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart, Philip...
Digitization is the animating force of everyday life. Rather than defining it as a technology or a medium, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life argues that digitization is a socio-historical process that is contributing to the erosion of democracy and an increase in political inequality, specifically along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Taking a historical approach, Janet Kraynak finds that the seeds of these developments are paradoxically related to the ideology of digital utopianism that emerged in the late 1960s with the rise of a social model of computing, a set of beliefs furthered by the neo-liberal tech ideology in the 1990s, and the popularization of networked computing. The result of this ongoing cultural worldview, which dovetails with the principles of progressive artistic strategies of the past, is a critical blindness in art historical discourse that ultimately compromises art’s historically important role in furthering radical democratic aims.
Provence Report is a biannual arts and culture magazine showcasing contemporary fashion, criticism, art, music, literature and photography. The winter 2018-2019 edition features stories about artists using their skills in the service of others and explores conceptions of artistic value and labor.
A cultural examination of the enigmatically iconic figure of the Dandy, both in history and as a figure for the future. No sooner had the first Dandy entered the scene at the beginning of the nineteenth century than he was declared dead. This enigmatic yet immediately iconic figure would remake an entrance again and again in the decades that followed. Like an elegant harbinger, Dandys arrive in times of crisis when societies are undergoing transformation. Like the hands of a clock, their silhouettes become messengers of change. But they are contours of change that carry no message. While everything is already in flames, they debate the shape of their shoes and sip oysters to combat their dep...