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 critic 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 he found in place, 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: Associations 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.

Historian, philosopher and filmmaker Peter L. Galison delivers the fifth John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture. Galison is Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His main work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. He is author of several books among them Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1998) and Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (2003), and the producer of two films, The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma (2000) and Secrecy (2008). In 1997, Peter Galison was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Named after one of the university’s most influential art history teachers, this lecture series honors John McDonald Moore’s contribution to the university’s intellectual life. Moore taught art history and criticism at The New School from 1968 until his death in 1999. His classes were famously popular for bringing the vision of an artist who is also a scholar to his students.

“The idea of monument and death
is the ultimate raw material of art.”

– Huma Bhabha

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The second speaker in the series is Huma Bhabha. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Bhabha  (b. 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan, lives in Poughkeepsie) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1985), and her MFA from Columbia University, New York (1989). In 2008, she was awarded the Emerging Artist Award from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.  She has had solo exhibitions at Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France, 2009; and Salon 94, New York, NY, 2007.  Her work has been presented in group exhibitions including: 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010; Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY, 2009; and After-Nature, The New Museum, New York, NY, 2008. Bhabha is represented by Salon 94, New York.

“Our generation sees modernist
art through the lens of pop culture,
not the other way around.”

– Thomas Houseago

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The last speaker in the series is Thomas Houseago. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Houseago (b. 1972 in Leeds, England, lives in Los Angeles) studied at Jacob Kramer Foundation College, Leeds (1991) and got his BA from St. Martin’s School of Art, London (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Thomas Houseago, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2009; Thomas Houseago: Ode, Galleria Zero, Milan, 2009; Herald St, London, 2008. He has also participated in group shows including: 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010; Beg Borrow and Steal, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, 2009; and Construct and Dissolve, Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, 2009. Houseago is represented by Michael Werner Gallery, New York.

“It’s interesting to see how
inanimate the figure can be, how
figurative art dies, how it scars,
how it shatters into mere things,
how it turns to dust…”

– Matthew Monahan

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The first speaker of the series is Matthew Monahan. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Monahan (b. 1972 in Eureka, California, lives in Los Angeles) received his BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, New York (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Modern Art, London, 2009; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2008; Focus: Matthew Monahan, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007. He has participated in group exhibitions including: Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, 2008; Unmonumental, New Museum, New York, 2007; Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2006. Monahan is represented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

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?

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Aleksandra Wagner. Grounded in her memory of a purchase of A Thousand and One Nights in the Serbian translation by Stanislav Vinaver, Wagner chooses the shortest month of a year, February, to tell stories about the acts of storytelling in education and in psychoanalysis. One story a night, one page each, shared on the night of March 3.

Aleksandra Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Bachelor’s Program, The New School for General Studies, and a Member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Wagner is the editor of our recent publication Considering Forgiveness.

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Pablo Helguera. Providing an “unauthorized biography” of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Helguera digs out little-known stories around the remarkable curators and other colorful figures of its past, while at the same time reflecting on the social role of individuals in museums and the way in which they influence the reading of objects and the larger narratives of collections.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. His work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction.

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. Four specific “paradoxes” – dealing with issues of economy, geography, politics, and sustainability – provided entries to a discussion of cities as both spaces of hope and sites of vulnerability.

RESPONSE: William Morrish
The response is offered by William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design. Trained as an architect, Morrish comes to Parsons from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he taught and led research in the areas of sustainable urban infrastructure, new housing models, and global urbanization and climate change. In that role, he focused on interdisciplinary work addressing what he calls the “second generation of sustainability”: the design of cultural ecologies. He is a nationally recognized urban designer whose practice encompasses inter-disciplinary research on urban housing and infrastructure, collaborative publications on human settlement and community design, and educational programs exploring integrated design, which are applied to a wide range of innovative community-based city projects.

Michael Cohen’s lecture focused on the discrepancy between emerging ideas on sustainable urban development and the realities of implementing them on the ground, in the growing global city. The four points of his lecture identify the reasons that capacity cannot be delivered, namely the lack of adequate research, tools and models. His lecture points to the disturbing fact that most of our urban development skills are based on outdated concepts that identify master plans and large projects as the cure for urban ills. Cohen began to sketch the challenge faced when transferring stimuli for change from to the top to a middle zone, where local economic, social and ecological activities can aggregate into more sustainable urban networks of support. The sobering conclusion of his lecture was that we have little time to change practice and behavior. As the polar ice caps melt, cities are being flooded with new social, cultural and environment realities.

Yet within this maelstrom of global urban change, communities such as Bogotá, Columbia, and Rosaria, Argentina, are overhauling the old the rules of planning, governance and management procedures. Civic leaders and neighborhood activists are learning how to turn the principles of sustainable development into new models of integrated design, inclusive operations, and regenerative practices. These transformations focus on the mid-size scale of the cities and combine it with basic everyday economic and social transactions, for instance by expanding mobility options, connecting micro-business networks, and designing open and transparent civic facilities as cultural centers.

The New School hosts Peter M. Rutkoff, Professor of American Studies at Kenyon College, to deliver a lecture commemorating the 90th Anniversary of the founding of The New School. Professor Rutkoff wrote New School: A History of The New School for Social Research, the seminal history of The New School and the only publication to deal with the university’s storied history in depth. The co-author of the only published monograph on the history of The New School, Rutkoff considers the heritage of the university on its 90th anniversary. In light of current debates on the challenges posed by urban schooling, pedagogy, and philosophy he will reexamine the influence of The New School in progressive education. Can the teachings of John Dewey (on the 150th anniversary year of his birthday) continue to serve as a guide to the direction of progressive education? He will draw on examples of school and university alliances and the on-going importance of experiential pedagogy in contemporary education. He will, to cite Zorah Neale Hurston, urge American schools to leave the classroom.

Sponsored by The New School and held in conjunction with the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”