On ArtSpeak

May 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

This past weekend I was able to attend one day of the two-day symposium “Art Speech” at MoMA, organized by Pablo Helguera, MoMA’s Director of Adult Education, and art historian and critic James Elkins. Billed as “A Symposium on Symposia” it promised to “anatomize art historians’ and artists’ habits at the podium,” presenting possible models by which lectures, gallery talks, slide presentations, and other conventions of communication in the field (such as museum audio tours and multimedia presentations) might be analyzed and their effectiveness assessed.

Sounds pretty basic—at least to the WAC-oriented among us—but it generated plenty of excitement across the field from the moment it was announced, and the sold-out auditorium held a pretty diverse range of people across the field: from academics, journalists, and bloggers to artists, museum directors and curators. Since accusations of impenetrability and obscurantism are leveled at so-called “artspeak” from within and without its many and varied institutions, and have been for some time—at least since the dawn of postmodernism—an interrogation of its forms seems well overdue at this point. (Of course, there may well have been such investigations that I’m just not aware of, but not by a preeminent institution like MoMA. Somewhat embarrassingly, the only one that comes to mind was featured in the one-off parody rag November, a spoof of the entrenched art history journal October: it featured the transcript of a roundtable on the perks that roundtables afford neo-Marxist intellectuals.) As the organizers pointed out in their opening remarks, the catchall concept of “performativity,” to which discussions on the conventions of art speech are usually relegated, has thus far not been tremendously useful.

Philosopher and critic Jonathan Gilmore, in a brief historical survey of the slide lecture, read a quote attributed to a student of legendary Swiss critic and “master of extemporaneous speaking” Heinrich Wölfflin: “[He]… places himself in the dark and together with his students at their side. He thus unites all concerned and becomes the ideal beholder, his words distilling the experiences common to everyone… Wölfflin’s speech never gives the impression of being prepared, something completed that is projected onto the art work. Rather it seems to be produced on the spot by the picture itself. The art work thus retains its preeminent status throughout. His words do not overwhelm the art but embellish it like pearls.” As anyone on the receiving end of the average art history survey course cam attest, this is one nineteenth-century straw man that may, in fact, still need a bit of demolishing.

This question of audience, and the pitfalls and practicalities of imagining such an “ideal beholder” was a problem to which speakers and the audience would continually return. In dishing out interpretation to an artificially “unified,” authoritative voice to an equally constructed recipient, what happens to the cacophony of argument that comprises the field in actuality—and how do those conversations move forward, rather than being preemptively shut down? Writer, curator, and editor Monika Szewczyk, whose ongoing “Art of Conversation” series centers on the interruptions of speech in and around art, focused on this problem in the context of a prosaic form: the museum audio guide. Deconstructing MoMA’s audio text for Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (by its chief curator of painting and sculpture, Anne Temkin), she pointed out that it “fails to ask a single question” or “provide more than one perspective.” To avoid perpetuating both the common disdain for the guide format and the dismissive, unproductive notion that one cannot pack any nuance at all into two minutes of speech, she took a stab at producing an alternate entry. Briefly, it pointed out that the work was an interpretive battleground, and touched on the Cubist struggle to present multiple points of view on a single picture plane and the picture’s confusion of feminine, masculine, and supernatural signifiers. It ended with a reference to Serge Guilbaut’s now-canonical assessment of New York’s replacement of Paris at the hotbed of the modernist avant-garde. In a discussion that followed, an audience member fantasized about furthering audio guide options to include brief examinations by other methodologies: ie, “Press “2” for a feminist interpretation of this work; press “3” for a psychoanalytic interpretation..” I, for one, love this idea—at least for some of the museum’s most iconic works.

Artist Carey Young presented the most original examination of “art speech” by inverting its context completely: instead of interrogating the speech practices of art experts, her Speechcraft project asked non-experts to engage in object analysis through the organization Toastmasters. (Toastmasters is an international club in which members, striving for greater success as “leaders” in what seems to be a primarily business context, learn to communicate authoritatively and charismatically by means of regular meetings and peer critique.) Among the objects Young had members interpret: a red candle in the shape of Lenin, a clear rubber ball encasing MoMA’s logo, and “Wall Street” brand cigarettes. Would lay persons produce more interesting critique around these objects than the artist herself might have? From the limited video I watched, sometimes yes and sometimes no. The real potential to the project, for me, is the affective explication of the values associated with the speech of a “successful” leader in “business:” clear, authoritative, and well-rehearsed—but with the impression of being absolutely extemporaneous. Laid bare in the context of an artwork, the efforts of Toastmasters members, even when wholly and charismatically competent, seem unusually, surprisingly poignant.

Much of the rest of the symposium day involved an analysis, through a sort of de-construction and re-construction, of a snippet of a talk by famed Marxist art historian TJ Clark. Swiss economics and management professor Claus Noppeney attempted to strip away Clark’s rhetorical flourishes and present his main arguments (on Paul Cezanne’s critique of his teacher Camille Pissarro’s changing style) in Powerpoint, resulting in laughably banal bullet points like: “History is Valuable; Great apprentices find unique ways to learn; and Imitation can lead to Innovation.” A fun diversion, but an unnecessary one: I’m not sure anyone present would have argued for the respective absolute autonomy of style and content. Happily, English scholar Ellen Levy followed with an insightful analysis of Clark’s style: his liberal use of value judgments in his speech (things are “wonderful” or “brilliant” and historic predecessors “surely wrong” in their analysis) as appealing to a primal desire in listeners; his use of the first person, building the impression of the art historian as primal excavator of meaning; and his denigration and characterization of the idea of artworks as harboring a single, unified idea as “lyric.” (The latter, though not meant as an actual dismission of poetry, irked at least one poet in the audience.) Levy gave a really convincing assessment of the agonism inherent to Clark’s speaking style, in which he conjures, by inference, the polyphony of debate and political superstructures that comprise the construction of meaning.

There was much touched on that was valuable and potentially useful that day. However, after Levy’s beautifully nuanced model, the conversation devolved somewhat into a discussion of the “best” art talks that the audience and remaining panel members had ever experienced: a conversation which ultimately, and somewhat uncritically, began to privilege an art-speech model of narrative surprise-fact-unearthing and case-making: art history as detective novel with a surprise twist ending. This slide from modes of analysis to modes of experience was, for me, premature and disappointing: I had hoped for more and further revealing insights on the constructions of language around art; for example, the many rhetorical crutches we all (sometimes detrimentally) rely on in the field. Levy’s insights come from the study of language and poetry; perhaps more people outside the field were needed: a linguistic anthropologist, maybe? Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to follow up on Saturday’s discussions: I’ll have to wait til the symposium shows up on MoMA’s website (or until someone enlightens me in comments).

Filed Under: Art, Conferences, Uncategorized

The Qydz are alright

May 20, 2011 By 1 Comment

I suppose after Linell’s, John’s, and David’s timely and thoughtful responses to Grant McCracken’s Symposium keynote talk, it might be overkill or overdue to pitch in my inflation-adjusted 

But seeing as some of my BLSCI colleagues might be awaiting something from one who could talk some smack but still state facts, get down to brass tacks, not exactly attack but risk a lack of tact, and maybe attract fellow hacks to take a crack at McCracken. Wise-cracks and shellackings, maybe followed by retractions and being sent home packing.

Or maybe a pact. But not exactly to shack up intellectually with this jack of all trades and his tract on value-extraction.

Alack, what to make of McCracken?

I started calling myself an anthropologist not too long ago, and since Dr. McCracken does as well, I suppose we have something in common. I suppose our differences are an invitation for me to police the boundaries of our discipline. The stakes seem to be broader than just defining what a proper understanding of anthropology or ‘culture’ can or should be. In any case, for all their propensity to deploy opaque jargon, anthropologists don’t maintain a monopoly on the concepts and methodologies of their field. Ethnography is increasingly popular in business, law, design, as well as other academic disciplines. The right to talk about culture belongs to everyone. I don’t think many anthropologists would object to that sentiment.

That said, McCracken’s take-away message was that successful companies need to be hip to culture and its vagaries, especially of a certain category of people he referred to repeatedly as the ‘Qydz.’

The Qydz are, as I understood McCracken, a rather large and underexamined tribe. They actually live among us, rather than in some faraway rainforest or mountainous highland. (At least, we aren’t so interested in the Qydz residing in such remote lands.)

These Qydz are the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism. Any business worth its salt should devote its energies toward studying the values and aesthetic tastes of this people. For the Qydz are nothing else if not consumers. And oh, the stuff they consume! Baggy jeans! Flip-out keyboard texting gizmos! Snapple!

Apparently, the Qydz are not born or raised. They have no provenance, no parentage, no institutions that foster their development. They simply appear in their present form (or ‘respawn’ as they might say in their own video-game parlance), as autonomous beings arranged into ‘generations’ we can only designate as ‘X’ or ‘Y’ (no word yet on any Generation Z sightings). Qydz culture prizes individualism, but their collective will is mighty and a thing to be feared only if business does not have the products to appease them.

Three female Qydz foraging for sustenance (not such a rare sighting, actually)

McCracken is right to suggest that capitalism has been increasingly dependent on the desires of consumers as a resource to mine and extract value. (Actually, he never said this outright, but it seems central to his research agenda.) Is this a fair assessment of capitalism, Linell seems to ask in the previous post? I would add, is this a fair assessment of desire?

For McCracken, the wants of the Qydz are limited only to their own imaginations, which, he contends, are limitless. Business can only hope to track the Qydz desires by means of increasingly sophisticated trend-tracking technology and–gasp!–ethnographic methods. Yes, really getting to ‘hang’ with some Qydz is a thrilling and potentially dangerous experience.

Academics spend oodles of time with Qydz, but McCracken may lament the time professors waste speaking to them, teaching them of our ways of life, rather than listening to and observing them. Pity.

It is increasingly clear that the Qydz are a natural resource we must safeguard carefully, lest they begin to imagine and wish for things business cannot manufacture and sell to them.

Great former tribesman Qydz referred to as Qurt Qobayn (center). He is still revered on t-shirts and other sacred memorabilia as an unsatisfied customer.

Filed Under: Baruch College, BLSCI, Conferences, Culture, edupunk, Fun, Politics, Resources, Symposium, To Ponder, Tools, What if . . .

Capitalism, critique and catastrophe

May 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Shoting star and other dollar origami by Corey Comenitz http://www.corigami.com/Gallery_3.html

I’m following John and David’s posts, both of which I think responded insightfully and eloquently to aspects of Grant McCraken’s presentation that I was too flustered by to take on myself. My immediate thought, following McCraken’s argument that anthropology should be a tool for companies, analyzing culture in order to help companies capture potential consumers, was that the motives of academics and business people are different. The task of academics is to question social structures—like the relationship between culture and the marketplace—in terms of how they affect human flourishing. And, the task of business people is to grow business. Either their job is not to care how their business affects human flourishing (writ large, not just the shareholders and consumers), or to assume that the growth of business is an inherent and general good.

But, is this a fair assumption or a prejudice? As soon as I had articulated this thought to myself, as a possible response to McCraken, I realized it sounded like a prejudice. This led me to think about the tropes that commonly circulate among academics, and to think of the generalizations made on both sides of the business/academic divide.

RSA videos have been circulating recently among my friends (and fellow academics). The first one that circulated among my (academic) friends was Slavoj Zizek’s “First tragedy, then farce.” The next was the David Harvey’s “Crises of Capitalism,” also posted on cac.ophony. One thing that struck me about them both is the catastrophic view of capitalism. Harvey ends his argument by saying that capitalism will only continue to become more extreme, that it is a phenomenon that far exceeds the range of our current political discourse, even our current political framework. Zizek suggests (with tiny caveats, it’s just a suggestion!) that charity merely mitigates the “zero point” of the increase in human suffering inherent to capitalism.

This is an old idea, made glamorous by a celebrity and by technology. Yet Zizek acts, though he cites Oscar Wilde, as if this were an original insight. I do think Marx’s ideas are still very relevant and useful today, but I’m frustrated that Marx still seems like a daring and challenging reference, and an endpoint. When his ideas are re-voiced outside of academic context, they seem to me to be more invoked and applied than built upon.

What I’d like to see turned into an RSA is perhaps Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, in which he studies the oppressions of several different political and economic forms, in different historical periods, and measures them against revolutions and the forms of governance and economics that replaced the old. No clear winners. I’d like to see some of George Yúdice’s ideas in an RSA. For example, he argues in The Expediency of Culture, that capitalism in its current phase is capturing more of human life, turning more and more of culture into a commodity. At the same time, he says, commodification has been cultured. The marketplace is more and more in the hands of more and more people. This takes us to last year’s keynote speaker, Clay Shirkey, who described Amazon as a kind of partial democratization of the marketplace. Or is it the commodification of democracy? Yúdice sees the capacity for the distribution of political agency, for more inclusive and effective solidarities, in this phase of the relationship between capital and culture.

In order to actually be able to turn speeches like McCraken’s into opportunities for mutually constructive criticism and dialogue, I think we might need to agree that we come to the table with a different set of prejudices about terms like the marketplace, capitalism, business, and academia. And would it be possible to have a conversation about who and how business and academia see themselves as serving to advance human flourishing?

Filed Under: BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Liberal Arts, Politics, Symposium

On Surveying Culture (“Bah-dah dumb dumb dumb”)

May 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I had big plans for this blog post, significantly my final one as a Schwartz fellow (my fixed one-year term is winding down).  I wanted to write something smart and serious, something befitting the forward-thinking work of the Schwartz Institute, something that might even make some tiny-but-useful contribution to the larger cause, the cultivation of richer multimodal communication in the undergraduate sphere.  Last Friday, the Institute’s annual symposium, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Communication,” gave me some choice fodder, but as you’ll see, I got a little off-track.

I was variously enlightened, amused, provoked, and galvanized by the eclectic cast of speakers and commenting participants, but the opening keynote lecture, by Chief Culture Officer-author Grant McCracken, stirred the most furious note-taking.  The rhetoric—both implicit and explicit—of McCracken’s fervent, room-roaming pitch seemed geared exclusively toward business executives and heads of marketing.  Being quite decisively a member of neither group (just ask my paycheck)—indeed, being instead, if anything, precisely the sort of trend-following consumer-creature McCracken urged his audience to scrupulously “survey,” “understand,” and satisfy—I had the weird sensation of secretly listening in on a power-discussion I wasn’t supposed to hear.  The strategies announced in the talk were not really for me and my kind (students, humanities professors) to use; they were more about making use of people like me.  McCracken’s advocacy of a corporate anthropology also entailed a curious, disconcerting elision (read “burying”) of the ethical dimensions and ends in play, even as these things were gestured-to in vague ways.

I tried to quickly formulate something for the Q-and-A time, but I missed my chance. Thus I thought I’d use this blog as an impetus to write up the comment/question I wasn’t able to stutter through (e.g., “You’ve just enjoined us to develop a ‘deep, scholarly feeling for American culture’ so that we might ‘understand where cultural change is heading,’ but  wherefore?  To what ends and for whose benefit, this deep feeling and prophetic insight?  You say ‘we have to survey American culture’—an exhortative general prescription that seems generally benign—but  this is never a neutral activity; the method and meaning of such a survey will differ entirely according to the particular interests and investments of some given party.  In other words, which we do you mean in the above injunction?   Surely you don’t think there is real harmony and shared purpose that unites or can conflate, for example, corporations and consumers and scholars?  You directed ‘us’ to find and heed  ‘the wisdom of [our] crowd,’ so that we might create ‘opportunities for better communication.’  What is this ‘wisdom’ and this ‘better’?   These words imply an ethos and some degree of measurability, but in this context are they not mere euphemisms for only that signalling with and to consumers that leads to higher profits for the company in question?”); in the end, though, I couldn’t quite harness my thoughts, so I reneged on the whole McCracken thing.  I decided to forego writing about it at all, and meekly retreated to a handful of lighter things I’d already jotted into my “Cacophony” notebook, a tiny harvest from my own culture-scanning: three noteworthy instances of a-la-mode language-distortion plucked from the current advertising landscape.   Therefore, in keeping with my penchant for bathos and anticlimax, I thus bow out with this turn to the trivial (not a bang but a bemused whimper), presenting the following curious excerpts—a few signs o’ the times—in hopes that they might be a bit more amusing and arresting in framed, excerpted form.

1. The word “technology” has become a potent cipher in marketing, a near-mystical and tautologically self-legitimizing term.   Nowhere have I found the un-moored power of this word more distilled than in the back-of-the-box marketing copy for the hit product “Power Balance” wristbands, which seem to be a sort of highly evolved snake-oil:

Created by athletes dedicated to holistic care, Power Balance is a Performance Technology that is a favorite among elite athletes and individuals that strive to perform at the top of their game, no matter what it is. We’re helping people excel with a revolutionary technology that’s changing the way people live, work and play.

Power Balance is committed to bringing our wearable performance technology to everyone so each individual can maximize their potential and live life to its fullest. We are dedicated to compassionate business practices, a firm belief in our products, and helping people every day.

Is it any wonder these things are selling like mad?  All-purpose, wearable technology for what ails ya, in assorted colors (from a company so confident they don’t even need to bother offering actual claims or explanations about how or why their product works!).

2. If advertisers tend to overuse and spin certain stalwart, familiar words (like “technology,” “advanced,” “organic,” or “you”) until they acquire a numinous aura, they also, on the other end of a distortion-spectrum, play cut-up havoc with words, hoping their monstrous inventions might snag a few more buyers.  Beauty products and food seem to be the favored realms for this Frankensteinian practice.  Here’s my recent favorite by a long margin, the  feverish, desperate, mind-bending species-name “Any’tizers QuesaDippers”, from chicken giant Tyson.  I’ll just let that gem sparkle on its own; commentary would dilute or mar the sheer fact of it, no?

3. My final offering is simply a trio of TV commercials—all of them around 30 seconds—that have a rather odd feature in common: each commercial culminates with a group of men vigorously chanting some sequence of non-word syllables.  The products are comically disparate, and each chant does have its own rhythm, length, volume, and style, but watching all three in immediate succession clearly reveals an uncanny thread of continuity.  Herewith, then, exhibits A, B, and C, with my own careful transcriptions of each chant serving as headings (remember to watch each piece through to its end):

Coke Zero: “DAHH-DAHH-duh-duh-duh-DAHH!”

Farmers Insurance: “We are Farmers! BOM-bah-DUM-bum-bum-bum-BUM!”

Planet Fitness: “DUM-dum-dum-DUM, DUM-dum-dum-dum-DUM-dum-dum-dum, DUM-dum-dum-dum, [cool?]”

I suppose we’d have to call this a trend of some kind, a complement or counterpart to the slew of aggressively precious songs that score so many commercials.  Here, there is a defiant eschewing of the jingle (melodic, refined, slogan-based, and, somehow, “feminine”) in favor of the chant (rhythmic, raw, non-verbal, and robustly “masculine”).  Instead of a catchy ditty we have what sounds like a rugby team revving up for a match.  Is the same ad firm behind all three commercials, or are these correlates merely coincidental?  Either way, what does this trend indicate about the culture to which it’s tied?  Did we demand these loud, goofy-harsh phonemes or were they rather launched at us, with a view to tapping into more primitive parts of our brains?  And what do all of the above examples say about communication in the public, commercial sphere?  I don’t know.  I’ll have to do some more surveying and spend a lot more time thinking about this stuff.  Meanwhile, I’m sure Grant McCracken and the other savvy Chief Culture Officers out there will work to fathom these mysteries (if they haven’t already), toward their own purposes.  So be it.  Bah-dah-bum.

Filed Under: Culture, Marketing, Technology

Terence McKenna, Kinetic Typography, and the Evolution of Consciousness

May 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Apart from being an adequate summation of the thoughts and feelings that churned through my head while watching Grant McCracken‘s presentation at the Schwartz Communication Institute’s Annual Symposium on Friday, the above video provides a potent condensation of the philosophical contributions of a complex and fascinating American cultural figure, Terence McKenna.

McKenna’s interests ranged from psychedelics and shamanism to technology and aliens.  Among the many insanely weird ideas he brought into the culture (through a series of books and recorded lectures, often passed between fellow travelers like Grateful Dead bootlegs), McKenna intuited, at a very early stage of its development, that the Internet would launch humanity into a new state of conscious evolution.  For example, in this “trialogue” with esoteric colleagues Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham, recorded in 1994, McKenna repeatedly predicted the rapid expansion of digital technology and insisted, to the skeptical voices of Sheldrake and Abraham, that “within a decade” the web would play a dominant role in all sectors of human social organization.  All three, however, agreed that human beings alive on the planet at this point in history have access to exponentially larger amounts of data than any previous.  As available digital information becomes literally infinite, acquiring knowledge will become a significantly different experience.  More than ever before, it will be important for people to consciously navigate these streams of data by editing out the extraneous and unnecessary, and developing the skills to more effectively locate (and internalize) the most useful bits. In other words, we are going to have to learn how to find the good stuff in ways we’ve never imagined.

The above video is an example of “kinetic typography,” a form of animated text that provides a visual accompaniment to spoken word.  The medium is perfect for condensing complex ideas and highlighting particular portions of larger speeches and lectures, mainly because it transcribes the actual words and makes the words themselves visually arresting.  I’m intrigued by the development of “pedagogical art forms” like kinetic typography that seek to reduce great ideas to their essence while maintaining the original intellectual rigor.  The RSA Animate series, featuring this popular entry from CUNY’s own David Harvey, similarly takes what might seem like “difficult” ideas and makes them come alive in a brilliant, easy-to-digest, entirely satisfying experience:

I’ve also shown this clip featuring Slavoj Zizek to my classes on a couple different occasions, and even though Zizek’s ideas can sometimes be hard to follow, by the time the clip is over, students have always been eager and able to conduct a serious discussion of the issues he raises:

I have no doubt that developments like kinetic typography will, in a relatively short amount of time, be built upon, changed, and probably discarded as technology and collective creativity combine to develop new forms of transmitting valuable information within an ever-increasing cacophony (no pun intended) of available data.  This process will likely constitute a sea change in the evolution of human consciousness.  As McKenna himself once declared, the terms of this transformation are clear:

“It’s as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how ‘if God did not exist, Man would invent him,’ and said ‘if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it’ — in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.”

 

Filed Under: Culture, Internet

Art Thoughtz

May 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It’s the very end of the semester, and although I haven’t had to administer exams or do any grading, through several colleagues I’ve been privy to some of the creative answers to questions that crop up on final essays in my field (art history).

I won’t re-post (at least not verbatim) some of the unique, hilarious, or just plain sad interpretations on, say, definitions of the Counter-Reformation or of institutional critique. But, as a past adjunct, I remember attempting to read more into the particular sort of irreverent artlessness that characterizes these answers. Some just demonstrate an utter lack of knowledge on the topic (like the student who claimed that Jasper Johns’ Three Flags was made to communicate that America was three times as great as any other nation).

But others seem to hold an implicit challenge to the complexity of a theory or idea. When a student tells me something along the lines of, “Institutional critique is when an artist goes into the museum and says that the museum is racist,” that claim is much more loaded (at least to me) with a challenge to teaching practice—making me think about how I’ve managed to convey (or not) the complexity of a watershed idea. It’s the kind of naivite that engages with critique in a way that’s a whole lot more troubling—to me as an educator, anyway.

The Philadelphia-based artist Hennessy Youngman (aka Jayson Musson) takes this kind of pointed naivite and brandishes it in the direction of the contemporary art world, in an attack on its recent histories, power structures, and proprietary approach to theory. Taking a resolutely vernacular approach in both character (his name is a combined reference to cognac brand Hennessy, beloved of hip-hop stars, and to old-school comedian Henny Youngman (of “Take my wife – no really, take my wife” fame). Adopting an Ali-G-esque low-rent gansta persona, he stars in a series of instructional videos entitled “Art Thoughtz” posted on YouTube, breaking down topics including relational aesthetics, post-structuralism, and “How to Be a Successful Black Artist.”

As a conceptual project, Musson’s videos are an interesting critique of the art world’s entrenched race and class issues. While his ramblings could use some editing, his one-liners are occasionally and hilariously spot-on. For example, his interrogation of the trendy, yet problematic concept of “post-black:” “Did someone from the future come back with that term, and niggas is, like, pink in the future?” and of dinner parties held in galleries under the rubric of relational aesthetics, “We all know that the gallery is an ideologically neutral environment that has nothing to do with the accumulation of wealth or the advancement of global capitalism.. that’s why the walls are white. White is neutral.”

It’s not exactly made to order for a survey course, but in any exam question involving a critique of modernism, I will happily accept, “Mother #$%er, you can’t step outside of history.”

Filed Under: Art, teaching