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Category Art and Politics, Politics and Art

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NYU Art and Politics Masters Program

Mar 22, ’11 9:17 PM

NYU Art and Politics Masters Program

The M.A. in Arts Politics: An Activist, Critical, Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

“The time has come to train unique arts activists–capable of activating critical and creative dialogue between art and the world, and committed to reshaping how art is produced, perceived and received.”

The politics that make art. The politics that art makes. This is an opportunity for artists and those working in the intellectual and institutional domains of art to enhance and elaborate the value and significance of their creative endeavors through intensive study, reflection, and engagement with the university and the world. Based at Tisch, the program combines a dedicated core faculty with access to faculty and courses from five different schools at New York University.

 

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The New School Vera List Center for Art and Politics

Mar 22, ’11 9:15 PM

The New School Vera List Center for Art and Politics

Mission

Founded in 1992 and named in honor of the late philanthropist, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School is dedicated to serving as a catalyst for the discourse on the role of the arts in society and their relationship to the sociopolitical climate in which they are created. It seeks to achieve this goal by organizing public programs that respond to the pressing social and political issues of our time as they are articulated by the academic community and by visual and performing artists. The center strives to further the university’s educational mission by bringing together scholars and students, the people of New York, and national and international audiences in an exploration of new possibilities for civic engagement.

 

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Arts Advocacy Day in Washington DC

Mar 22, ’11 9:13 PM

Arts Advocacy Day in Washington DC

The 24th annual Arts Advocacy Day is the only national event that brings together a broad cross section of America’s cultural and civic organizations, along with hundreds of grassroots advocates from across the country, to underscore the importance of developing strong public policies and appropriating increased public funding for the arts.

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Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium

Mar 22, ’11 9:10 PM

Emerging Leaders Symposium

The Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium at American University is an annual meeting for young professionals who work in the arts. It is an opportunity to discuss the issues, unique or universal, that affect arts organizations with students, peers, and experienced professionals.

Organized and run by a team of graduate students in the AU Arts Management Program, the Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium features a keynote address, a networking reception, and multiple professional development sessions held throughout the day.

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Eipcp: institut européen pour des politiques culturelles en devenir

Mar 22, ’11 9:08 PM

Eipcp: institut européen pour des politiques culturelles en devenir

Eipcp: what an ugly name.  Not only because the tongue suffers, trying to say it out loud.  It’s also that the terms and concepts hidden behind the acronym seem not to want to say anything, either individually or configured together:  European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.  This sounds more banal than ambitious.  What does it mean, this “progressive cultural policy”?  That one wants to reorder today’s hegemonic cultural politics in a progressive manner, and do it on a European scale?  An apparently ambitious aim for a little grouping of free-floating cultural workers who hope that the whole enterprise can be financed through the calculations of the very cultural politics they want radically to change.  And a “European institute”:  how should one understand this?  In any case, not as two corners in a rented room that at the same time also serves as a way-station for Albanian artworks traveling through Europe!

 

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Text: Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture

Mar 22, ’11 9:05 PM

Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine.

From Library Journal:

This companion volume to Exhibiting Culture (Smithsonian Pr., 1991) contains a series of essays that illustrate both the struggles and the collaborations between museums and the communities they aim to serve. Despite the essay format, common themes emerge. As America makes the transition from an industrial age to an information age, museums must review and revamp philosophy, mission, practices, and services; attempt to reconcile frequently incompatible aims; and alter programming to accommodate more diverse constituencies. In this context, forming a strong communicative circle linking exhibits and viewers is seen as vital to restoring wholeness to our pluralistic cultural arena. The range of voices heard to great effect in the preceding book continue to speak out here. Strongly recommended.
- Vicki Gadberry, Harris Media Ctr., Mars Hill Coll., N.C.

 

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Text: Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture

Mar 22, ’11 8:59 PM

Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright, “Images, Power and Politics” in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture

Visual culture is central to how we communicate. Our lives are dominated by images and by visual technologies that allow for the local and global circulation of ideas, information, and politics. In this increasingly visual world, how can we best decipher and understand the many ways that our everyday lives are organized around looking practices and the many images we encounter each day? Now in a new edition, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture provides a comprehensive and engaging overview of how we understand a wide array of visual media and how we use images to express ourselves, to communicate, to play, and to learn. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright–two leading scholars in the emergent and dynamic field of visual culture and communication–examine the diverse range of approaches to visual analysis and lead students through key theories and concepts.

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Interview with artist Thomas Hirschhorn

Mar 22, ’11 8:43 PM

Interview with artist Thomas Hirschhorn

Listening to Thomas Hirschhorn talk about art, it’s hard to resist the sensation that all the other artists have got it wrong. Not that he’s critical of their work — in fact, I’ve never heard him mention another living artist by name. It’s more a matter of getting caught up in his enthusiasm. Thomas Hirschhorn is a fanatic. His ardor for the thinkers after whom he names many of his works — Ingeborg Bachmann Kiosk, Deleuze Monument, Bataille Monument, and most recently, 24h Foucault — is evident not only in these works’ devotion to their subjects’ writings, but also in the sheer volume of material deployed toward this end.

Viewers must be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the amount of verbiage in Hirschhorn’s displays. How can they be expected to absorb all of it? How can they be expected to absorb ANY of it?

The answer is that they’re not. Whenever he’s given the chance, Hirschhorn reiterates that his works are not about education or the betterment of the viewer (“I am not a social worker”). Nonetheless, specialists in the fields of philosophy and museum education are, not surpsingly, unimpressed by what they see as his forays into their departments. By their standards, his artworks are failed attempts at didacticism. And what’s more, they don’t show their lofty subjects the respect they are due.

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Glen Ligon: America

Mar 22, ’11 8:34 PM

Glenn Ligon: America

Glenn Ligon: AMERICA is the first comprehensive mid-career retrospective devoted to this pioneering New York–based artist. Throughout his career, Ligon (b. 1960) has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. He is best known for his landmark series of text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Pryor. Ligon’s subject matter ranges widely from the Million Man March and the aftermath of slavery to 1970s coloring books and the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe—all treated within artworks that are both politically provocative and beautiful to behold.

 

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Artist: Tucuman Arde

Mar 22, ’11 8:30 PM

Tucuman Arde

“Tucuman Arde” is the name of a project executed by a collective of artists in Argentina in 1968. The artists conceived of art as an effective instrument for social change, and through the Tucuman Arde project they sought to bring the distressed social conditions of the Tucuman province to the attention of a large public. The project was conceived of as an intervention in mass communication, a circuit of counterinformation against the official one of the dictatorship.

A videotape about at the Queens Museum in New York resituating this important work in the context of Conceptual Art. In her essay “Escape Attempts,” Lucy Lippard had already pointed to the importance of the “Rosario group” as a model of a politicized conceptual art practice (in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, eds., Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975, Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, Los Angeles, 1995). The catalogue for the Queens exhibition includes information on the Tucuman Arde project, and an essay from the 1968 exhibition is included in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson’s anthology Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press, 1999).

 

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