CALL: Roberta Smith, Criticism: A Life Sentence

On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and…

Posted on February 22, 2010

CALL: Birth and Rebirth of a Nation, colloquium and film screening, September 26, 2009
Centered on D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, this day-long event reconsidered the notorious white supremacist manifesto in the context of the Obama call for change. The speakers, among them Douglas A. Blackmon, David W. Blight, Bill Gaskins, Margo Jefferson, Michelle Materre, Paul D. Miller (a…

Posted on December 2, 2009

CALL: Inaugural Lecture, Speculating on Change
The inaugural lecture on “Speculating on Change” was delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School on October 16, 2009. Cohen discussed cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change.…

Posted on December 2, 2009

CALL: Changing Labor Value
Changing Labor Value, a panel discussion on September 29, 2009, examined the nature of work in the digital era, focusing on the relationship between invisible labor, play, exploitation, pleasure, and the production of value. The speakers, Andrew Ross and Tiziana Terranova, considered the impact of corporate expropriation of value from millions of net users and offered some…

Posted on November 11, 2009

It might be useful to start with differences. Had Richard Sennett not fallen ill and participated, as intended, it would have been easier. After all his work is representative of a very learned but moderately progressive critique of the current problems of labor and it would have provided a more clear-cut counterpart to the more radical and transformative approaches of…

Posted on November 11, 2009

Prompted by Israel’s invasion of Gaza in January 2009, the following text by artist Roee Rosen and the response by anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao examine the public articulation of conflict, specifically the military acts in the current Israeli Palestinian conflict. Rosen posits that the comedic mode, which has yielded innocuous names for aggressive military actions, is a core trait of Israeli…

Posted on September 20, 2009

Joshua Simon is a curator and writer based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. He is the co-editor of Maayan Magazine for Poetry and The New & Bad Art Magazine and editor of Maarvon – New Film Magazine, all based in Tel Aviv. Among his projects in poetry is Red: Poems of the Working Class, an anthology in Hebrew and Arabic he co-edited (May Day,…

Posted on December 2, 2009

1. The Comic Mode of the Occupation
The name of Israel’s recent war in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, was taken from a Hanukkah nursery song that Israeli children know by heart. It was penned decades ago by Chaim Nahman Bialik who in Israel is known as the national poet (the complete line reads, “My uncle bought me a dreidel made of…

Posted on September 20, 2009

Where does conflict come from? The answer to this question is becoming ever more elusive, even in cases where we appear to know the answers, the protagonists and the situations well enough. Roee Rosen’s text, “The Law is Laughing: Fragments Following the War in Gaza,” asks what role the law occupies in a protracted conflict. The question itself is structured…

Posted on September 20, 2009