Conceptual Art In A Curatorial Perspective

Conceptual Art in a Curatorial Perspective: Between Dematerialization and Documentation' focuses on the curatorial practice of exhibiting conceptual art. The fact that conceptual works are not object-based, creates challenges in exhibiting or re-exhibiting them. This book offers various perspectives on how to handle conceptual art in the context of the museum, based on three detailed case studies and an extensive introduction in which the paradox of conceptual art is analyzed. It also elaborates on the history of exhibiting conceptual artworks, and on the influence of curators in their canonization.

During the mid-1960s avant-garde artists in New York developed a multimedia art form devoted to ideas instead of objects. A history of the movement can be traced back to the minimal art and the earlier works of Marcel Duchamp, the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. By 1965, such artists as Mel Bochner and Joseph Kosuth were turning away from conventional art and viewing art as a concept, based primarily upon language.

The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display.

"Surveys the life and work of the man widely known as 'the godfather of conceptual art.' Accompanying the eponymous exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, it is the first comprehensive attempt to chart Siegelaub's activities as a curator, publisher, bibliographer, and collector across different realms, from conceptual art and mass media to politics and textiles"--Back cover.

This book walks us through the process of how artworks eventually get their meaning, showing us how curated exhibitions invite audience members to weave an exhibition's narrative threads, which gives artworks their contents and discursive sense. Arguing that exhibitions avail artworks as candidates for reception, whose meaning, value, and relevance reflect audience responses, it challenges the existing view that exhibitions present “already-validated” candidates for appreciation. Instead, this book stresses the collaborative nature of curatorial practices, debunking the twin myths of autonomous artists and sovereign artistic directors and treating presentation and reception as separate processes. Employing set theory to distinguish curated exhibitions from uncurated exhibitions, installation art and collections, it demonstrates how exhibitions grant spectators access to concepts that aid their capacity to grasp artifacts as artworks. To inform and illuminate current debates in curatorial practice, Spaid draws on a range of case studies from Impressionism, Dada and Surrealism to more contemporary exhibitions such as Maurizio Cattelan “All” (2011) and “Damien Hirst” (2012). In articulating the process that cycles through exploration, interpretation, presentation and reception, curating bears resemblance to artistic direction more generally.

"This is a book for artists, but it is also for curators, art school faculty, landscape architects, gallerists, archivists, post-disciplinary multi-hyphenates, museum program staff, and anyone who wants to know about the ways art and congnitive science come together to engage an audience."--Cover

"... examines the numbers shows and follows Lippard's trajectory as critic and curator, tracing her growing political engagement and involvement with feminism. Extensive archival material is complemented by a new essay by Cornelia Butler and interviews with Lippard, Seth Siegelaub and exhibiting artists as well as critical responses written at the time by Peter Plagens and Griselda Pollock... also includes an essay by Pip Day analysing artists' initiatives in Argentina as a context for Lipard's emerging political consciousness." --back cover.

Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?

The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can’t make sense of contemporary art A classic of art criticism and philosophy, After the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art critics of his time, argues that traditional notions of aesthetics no longer apply to contemporary art and that we need a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of current art: that everything is possible. An insightful and entertaining exploration of art’s most important aesthetic and philosophical issues conducted by an acute observer of contemporary art, After the End of Art argues that, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, Danto makes the case for a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, “people’s art,” the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist’s philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn’t until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.