New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl has been called “America’s most important living art critic,” and “the unacknowledged dean of a bastard profession.” But is it? Schjeldahl takes on the challenge in a lecture/speech/manifesto he spent the summer burnishing for prime time at The New School for the 2011 International Art Critics Association/USA Distinguished Lecture. Like Wilde, he champions beauty in an era when it has been debased. He privileges personal confession over theory as the portal to comprehending art. “Paintings are vacations from myself,” according to the aggressively shy critic who started writing about art to support his poetry-writing habit. Schjeldahl has stipulated that the Q&A following his presentation be “open season,” in which the tables are turned and he readies himself for “questions, comments, and attacks.”

* * *

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He came to The New Yorker from The Village Voice, where he was the art critic from 1980 to 1998. Previously, he had written for The New York Times’ “Arts and Leisure” section. His writing has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Schjeldahl has received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association, for excellence in art criticism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of four books, including The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings, which was published in 1991.

This is the fifth AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism. It is presented by the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Associations Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

The second presentation in the spring Public Art Fund Talks at The New School series, New York Stories continues to explore the ongoing resonance of radical work created by artists who first came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s.

Artist Rob Pruitt speaks about The Andy Monument. His homage to Andy Warhol stands on a corner of 17th Street and Broadway, just as Warhol did when he signed and gave away copies of Interview magazine. Pruitt’s sculpture adapts and transforms the familiar tradition of classical statuary, and depicts Warhol as a ghostly, silver presence: a potent cultural force as both artist and self-created myth. Public Art Fund director and chief curator Nicholas Baume, cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, and artist and writer Rhonda Lieberman join the artist in a lively conversation about Warhol’s lasting influence on art and culture.

In collaboration with the School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons the New School for Design, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics presents an evening of discussion on the work of John Knight. Curator Sabine Breitwieser, writer Anne Rorimer, art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and critic André Rottmann convene to examine the artist’s pivotal role in the development of institutional critique and site-specific art. Moderated by New School faculty member, Simonetta Moro, the panel takes place on the occasion of the opening of Knight’s exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery on April 7, 2011.

Since the early 1970s John Knight has dedicated his practice to mapping the intersections of art, design, and institutional power through a series of spatial interventions and graphic maneuvers. Following closely on the architectural implications of Minimalism, Knight belongs to a generation of artists including Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, and Dan Graham that has consistently addressed the ideological valences of constructed space. Working “in situ,” all of Knight’s projects address the specific demands of their context, whether it be the gallery, the museum, the library, or the commercial billboard. Recent projects include shows at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2009); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin (2009); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2008); Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló (2008).

ByProduct is a new book that assembles the commentaries of artists, activists, curators, and interdisciplinary thinkers on cultural projects “embedded” in industries, the government, and other non-art sectors. Situated deeply in such institutions – and incorporating their architecture, language and much else – these projects produce meaning contingent on their host, becoming a “byproduct” of their existence. Whether the works are explicitly polemical, indirectly critical or instrumentalized by the host institutions is up for debate, and evokes old and new questions around political efficacy, and tactical media.

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Okwui Enwezor’s lecture is entitled “On the Politics of Disaggregation: Notes on Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits.”

Far more than for any other part of his oeuvre, Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles has become known for his project Insertions into Ideological Circuits from the early 1970s. In order to avoid censorship, Meireles printed images and messages onto various consumer items (such as recyclable Coca-Cola bottles) and bank notes already in wide circulation. Enwezor analyzes this body of work, maintaining that Meireles’ Insertions – like Jorge Luis Borges’ forking paths – operate at the gap between material flows, ideological structures, and nodes of value (symbolic, social, economic, political). The artist’s “insertions” are as much cuts inscribed on as they are breaks struck into formal structures of power, broadcast systems, and instruments of public transmission.

As Enwezor elaborates, “In tactical terms, the “insertions” represent the brutal scoring onto the sheets of public consciousness of the wild rumors of human existence caught in the grips of unaccountable power. Thus they are procedures of disaggregation carefully insinuated into spheres of everyday practice whether embodied in models of institutional totalization – for instance in the machineries of the State and multinational capital – or in the theological pieties of the church and family. In seeking to analyze and attack these scenes of production, communication, dissemination, and domination, Meireles in Inserções formulated the modalities of a counter-ideological discourse, one which through communicative action arrives at the address of its intended public by means of dispersal and detour into social structures and institutional systems.”

Enwezor’s talk follows two lectures on post-Fordism and artistic practices, delivered by sociologist Pascal Gielen and philosopher Michael Hardt on October 26.

*   *   *

Okwui Enwezor is a curator, writer, and scholar. He is the founding publisher and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Since 2005 he is Adjunct Curator at International Center of Photography, New York and was previously Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Enwezor was Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute (2005-2009) and has held academic appointments as Visiting Professor in Art History at University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, New York, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Umea, Sweden. In 2011 he will deliver the Alain Leroy Locke Lectures at Harvard University, and in 2012, he will serve as Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Enwezor has served as the Artistic Director of several leading biennials and global exhibitions including the 2^nd Johannesburg Biennale (1996-1997); Documenta 11 (1998-2002); 2^nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville, Spain (2005-2006); and 7^th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2007-2008). He is currently Artistic Director of Meeting Points 6, a performance and visual arts project bringing together theater, dance, film, and contemporary art in eight Arab and European cities (Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, Tangier, Brussels, Berlin). Amongst Enwezor’s numerous exhibitions are The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, Museum Villa Stuck; Century City, Tate Modern, London; Mirror’s Edge, Bildmuseet, Umea; In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940-Present, Guggenheim Museum; Global Conceptualism, Queens Museum, New York and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Stan Douglas: Le Detroit, Art Institute of Chicago; David Goldblatt: Fifty One Years, Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Center of Photography, New York; The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, Centro Andalucia de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, and Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, at International Center of Photography, New York. Some of his publications include Events of the Self: Contemporary African Photography from the Walther Collection (Steidl, 2010); Contemporary African Art Since 1980, with Chika Okeke-Agulu (Damiani Editore, 2009; Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (ICP/Steidl, 2008); Mega Exhibitions: Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (Fink Verlag, 2002); as well as edited volumes Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity with Terry Smith and Nancy Condee (Duke University Press, 2008), and Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (INIVA and MIT Press, 1999). He is currently completing work on two historical exhibitions: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Bureaucracy, Institutions and Everyday Life; and Sun in their Eyes: Photography and the Invention of Africa, 1839-1939, as part of trilogy of exhibitions focusing on the African continent at the International Center of Photography, New York.

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

In a double lecture and discussion Pascal Gielen and Michael Hardt discuss the role and the functioning of the art world from a philosophical and a sociological perspective. Gielen describes the art scene as a perfect production unit for economic exploitation in the contemporary network society as he searches for possibilities for artistic freedom in our Post-Fordist work contexts. Michael Hardt responds and argues that the Post-Fordist context offers the possibility of art as biopolitical production. He is asking the question whether artistic skills and talents can be deployed in a democratic project of the defense, production and distribution of the common. This event is paired with a lecture by curator Okwui Enwezor, presented on November 2, 2010.

*   *   *

Pascal Gielen is Professor of Sociology of the Arts at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. The director of the research group and book series Arts in Society, Gielen has written and co-authored several books on contemporary art, cultural heritage and cultural politics. In 2009, he edited the book Being An Artist in Post-Fordist Times (with Paul De Bruyne) and published The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude. Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Valiz). In 2010, Community Art and Beyond. The Political Potency of Trespassing was published (Valiz), also edited by De Bruyne and Gielen.

Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. With Antonio Negri he co-authored Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and CommonWealth (2009).

Comprehensive and sly, “Change Encounters” is a new project by Lin + Lam, developed over the course of the duo’s 2009-10 Vera List Center at the New School Fellowship and now making its debut.

Conceived in response to the Vera List Center’s focus theme “Speculating on Change,” Lin + Lam have collected an interdisciplinary array of cultural and historical predictive devices, appropriations from popular culture, historical sources, and academic scholarship, including original interviews with professionals from diverse backgrounds, and arranged this archive into an interactive website. “Change Encounters” offers multiple vantage points on the nature and the process of change and speculation and is accessed through a random number generator based on the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching, one of the oldest books in the world and a predictive device that is still commonly used today.

The project takes its name from the title of René Clair’s 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow, a comedy in which a journalist longs for the ability to know the future in advance in order to get a jump on breaking news. This desire for precognition determines human behavior across many fields of experience. Many a head of state – emperors, presidents and dictators, including Napoleon, Hitler and Reagan – has turned to oracles to authorize and consolidate their power. The capacity to aspire to a different future is, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, critical to the possibility for the underprivileged to overcome dire conditions. Can the capacity to aspire be learned and shared? What enables future thinking that is not a product of denial, defense or mere fantasy, but is constructive to change? For contemporary forecasting on our current recession and repressions, professionals from divergent fields join Lin + Lam and present their perspectives on how the future is speculated and formed.

Program

2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Introduction by Carin Kuoni, director, Vera List Center World Premiere of “Change Encounters” by Lin + Lam

3:00 to 4:00 p.m. Panel Discussion

Patricia Ticineto Clough Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York

Mitch Horowitz Editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

Orit Halpern Assistant Professor of Department of History at The New School for Social Research

H. Darrel Rutkin Independent scholar, historian of science with an emphasis on the history of medieval, Renaissance and early modern astrology 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. Celebratory Slideshow: Interactive demonstration of speculative devices and reception

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2011 focus theme “Speculating on Change.”

In awarding New York Times art critic Holland Cotter the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the Pulitzer Committee citation noted his “acute observation, luminous writing [and] dramatic story telling.” In his AICA/USA Distinguished Critic talk the writer known for the range and deep humanity of his concerns will address his roundabout route to art criticism, his response to the predominant modes of art criticism, the increasing limitations of that model, and how he imagines it could be changed and expanded.

This is the fourth AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism.  It is presented by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

AICA was founded in the wake of World War II to protect the openness of global discourse in the arts.  There are now chapters in 64 countries currently promoting art criticism and its insights into contemporary culture.  AICA/USA, with a nationwide membership, contributes significantly to the current dialogue.

Thirty years on from Rosalind Krauss’ seminal text Sculpture in the Expanded Field, a panel of artists and critics reconsiders the concept of the “expanded field” in light of contemporary art production. Co-sponsored by SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the discussion reflects upon how performative, discursive, and design models developed since the essay’s publication may have shifted the formal, political, and semiological parameters of sculpture today.

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 challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.

RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility

Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.

During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”

Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?

By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”

As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?

At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.

Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.

I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.

Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?

Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”

Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?

An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.

Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?