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.

In January 2009, artist and Parsons faculty member Melanie Crean launched The Shape of Change, an ongoing project consisting of two interconnected works that examine the ephemeral nature of change, independence and the formation of identity. The first work tracks change on an international scale on the Web site www.shapeofchange.com, an online archive of American and Iraqi desires for political change. Through the presentation and visualization of  opinions of artists, writers and the general public, this part of The Shape of Change seeks to countermand the empty political brand that the term ‘change’ was reduced to in recent American and Iraqi elections.

The second project looks at change on a personal scale, documenting an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, thus establishing itself as an independent social subject. In this conversation, scholars and practitioners from the fields of art, science and religion discuss how their concepts of change both correspond and differ.

Participants:

AA Bronson is an artist and healer living and working in New York City. In the sixties, he left university with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune, and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with gestalt therapy, radical education, and independent publishing. In 1969 he formed the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal; for the next 25 years they lived and worked together to produce the living artwork of their being together, in addition to undertaking over 100 solo exhibitions, and countless temporary public art projects. In 1974 they founded Art Metropole, Toronto, a distribution center and archive for artists’ books, audio, and video. From 1987 through 1994, they focused their work on the subject of AIDS. He is currently the President of Printed Matter, Inc., in New York City, and Artistic Director of the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.

Melanie Crean is Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design, teaching classes in experimental time-based work, mobile media and gaming. As the former Director of Production at Eyebeam, she founded a studio that worked with socially based moving image, sound, public art and open source software. She designed special effects at MTV Digital Television Lab and produced documentaries in Nepal, on subjects that include women trafficking and the spread of HIV along trucking routes. Crean has received commissions from Art in General, Bronx Arts Council, Harvestworks, NYFA, NYSCA, Rhizome and Creative Time.

Sensei Jules Shuzen Harris is a Soto priest who has been practicing Buddhism for more than twenty-five years. He holds an Ed.D. with a concentration in applied human development from Teachers College of Columbia University and a MSW from New York University. As a psychotherapist, Shuzen has found creative ways to synthesize Western psychology and Zen to achieve dramatic results with his patients. He also focuses on the relationship between Zen and the martial arts. He is a fourth-degree Dan Black Belt in Iaido (the art of drawing and cutting with a samurai sword) and a Black Belt in Kendo (Japanese fencing). He also founded two schools of Japanese swordsmanship in Albany, NY and Salt Lake City, UT.

Alaa Majeed is a reporter, producer, and translator. She received her BA from Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Majeed has co-produced segments for Al-Jazeera International and PBS. She has also reported for United Press International, Pacifica Radio, the BBC, National Public Radio, “60 Minutes,”and The Sunday Times (London). Her experience as a translator includes work with news services, conducting/translating classes for Iraqi civil servants, and a position with Nature Iraq, a non-governmental, environmental organization. She is currently also working as a researcher, monitoring news wires, documenting press freedom violations, and conducting investigative interviews with journalists overseas for the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York. In 2007, she received the International Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Presented as part of Streaming Culture / Art & Politics, a new interdivisional initiative organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor, UCLA, and Director of Research, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School of Design, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

If you are not able to join us in person, log on to:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/parsons-the-new-school-for-design

Friendship and hospitality frame a series of conversations this spring at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in collaboration with the Bachelor’s Program at The New School for General Studies. Each evening features a faculty member from The New School who introduces their best friend—a prominent figure outside of The New School, and coming from a field different from the one of the host. Friendship and hospitality serve as more than framing devices: they are engaged in a variety of ways, and each pair is free to choose their approach in elaborating on the story of their friendship. The evening has a strong social element. The audience is invited to mix, eat, and drink—gestures of hospitality are extended to all present.

Participants Filmmaker Vladan Nikolic, Associate Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film and Media Studies, The New School, and Director and Producer (Surla Films), will host Eric Werthman, psychotherapist and director of Going Under (2004).

This panel discussion examines the viability of the conventionally printed and published book —monographic, serial, facsimile, high-value, low-budget, no-budget, and otherwise—as a means of artistic production in view of digital media. At a time of mass convergence, when much of the social experience is structured by virtual, electronic means, how might the physical and material residue of small-scale publications distinguish themselves from a space apart for resistance and subjectivity? Moderated by Gil Blank, the panel includes artists Roe Ethridge and Collier Schorr, alongside with James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff of Primary Information.

The Aperture Foundation, publisher of Aperture magazine, is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to the support and advancement of photography as a fine art. In collaboration with the Photography Program in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons Confounding Expectations XI is generously supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Henry Nias Foundation, the ASMP Fund, and the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. The lecture series has been hosted by The New School since 2001.

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?

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 Andrew Ross and Tiziana Terranova (from now on AR and TT). In their cases, difference might be too strong a word. It might be more appropriate to talk about degrees of emphasis. Yet, I am going to highlight a few areas where, in my opinion, they diverge in the hope of adding some clarity to the current discourse on the nature of labor and on its possible political ramifications.

There is a strong sense of continuity, almost inevitability, in AR’s picture of the current restructuring of labor, particularly in the case of the so called creative industries and new media industries with working conditions of a high degree of flexibility and precariousness. AR explicitly claims that such restructuring is but the latest stage of a trend that started in the 1920s under the managerial practices of Human Relations. I find this assertion rather problematic because either it is too general a statement about the constant attempt on the part of capital to regiment its workforce by force or inducement (and in this case it can be applied to the history of capitalism even before the advent of Human Relations), or, if it is the result of a comparative analysis of specific managerial strategies, it misses the important point that the current capitalist turn in regards to labor is a repudiation of Human Relations’ theories and practices of the past. In fact, at the risk of simplifying, one can say that the break between Fordism and Post-Fordism consists, to a great degree, in the substitution of Human Relations with what it is often called distributed management or self management, and therefore with an entirely new conception of what management and labor are.

Historically, Human Relations were developed to respond to the failure of Taylorism and Scientific Management in order to create a docile work force that could be molded to fit the dictates of standardized mass production (the assembly line being the epitome of such arrangement), and to deal with workers’ subjectivity and their rebellion to work rules and work rhythms. Thus, Human Relations began to consider the work force as a counterpart to be dealt with through some form of communication and negotiation. It led eventually to the recognition of shop floor representation albeit with a clear separation of management from waged labor. More broadly, it corresponded to the dialectics of classes of the Keynesian system and of the welfare state.

The neoliberal turn and the Post-Fordist mode of production have drastically changed the terms of engagement. In rethinking the enterprise, to the point of envisioning its disappearance in a series of distributed entities, current management theory tries to capture the realities of drastically reconfigured labor dynamics characterized by work teams, temporary employment, flexible skills, and amateur “free labor.” For AR, these new realities are but an extension of old Human Relations strategies. The difference today is only in the degree of “permissiveness” (AR). It is not by chance that for AR Harry Braverman is a paradigmatic author. Capitalism leads inevitably to a progressive impoverishment of the quality of labor and to the socialization of alienation and exploitation, a sort of proletarianization of the whole society that might not take the form of deskilling, as Braverman claims, but that leads to even worse conditions of sacrificial labor and self exploitation.

For TT, the importance of the present restructuring consists instead in the novelty and discontinuity that they represent in relation to the previous social economic formation. TT is interested in understanding the current changes in managerial practices, but also in reading these changes against the grain, so to speak, from the other side of the relationships of production. Thus, she is interested in analyzing not only the new forms of extraction of value from labor, but also the new subjective practices that accompany and shape those relations, and in drawing implications for a new political strategy.

Interestingly enough it is Marx that provides a guide to understand the current shift in the nature of labor. Marx shows that there are always two inextricably connected sides of the labor process: the side of exploitation and alienation, and the side of cooperation. In general, the Marxist tradition has emphasized the former and left the latter to the realm of politics and consciousness, beyond the labor process. Yet, the changing nature of labor in Post-Fordism has shifted the balance of productive forces towards the side of cooperation. Increasingly, it is social engagement, both in the sense of interpersonal relationship and symbiosis with technological artifacts, that pushes innovation and creativity to the center of production by transforming machinery into media.

But cooperation is also the site of subjective practices of resistance, and here is where TT sees the opening of new possibilities for alternative forms of production. We could say succinctly that where AR is describing the new conditions of labor as a social factory, TT sees them as a factory of the social. Work in the new productive landscape is increasingly characterized by communication, symbolic interaction, affective engagements. It entails less and less fabrication and more social cooperation, something that TT and others call “immaterial labor.” And these are the material conditions that give rise to new subjective practices.

The difference between the two approaches becomes even more evident when their proponents envision future developments and formulate alternatives. In my view, AR’s analysis leads ultimately to a very defensive position. It seems that his main concern is to alleviate the deteriorating working conditions of the labor force and to fight the onslaught of neoliberalism’s restructuring, which indeed has created, particularly in the present crisis, massive unemployment, the increase in precarity and the abolition of safety nets. To respond to such devastating dislocations, much more has to be done in terms of providing adequate income maintenance programs (see for instance the current push on health care) or developing new forms of labor organization that expand across economic sectors and global fragmentation. But if we follow TT’s perspective, these struggles have a much greater strategic value to the extent to which, in addition to being defensive measures, they prefigure new productive arrangements and alternative social configurations.

Take, for instance, the proposal of guarantee income. Whatever the difference between Europe and the U.S., in terms of historical circumstances and short term feasibility, it appears to be an proposal that is gaining ground and could be central to a policy debate in the near future. However, guarantee income can be conceptualized quite differently and have different political implications: For AR, guarantee income is a remedy for the instability and flexibility of employment. By providing income security it increases the chances of finding adequate employment. For TT, guarantee income is, in a larger context, a stepping stone in the direction of severing the relation between income and work. Guarantee income that is based on life needs and not productive performance goes a long way in prefiguring and giving sustenance to experiments of non-economic productive arrangements. The political value of a struggle around guarantee income is in linking of immediate defensive measures to the strategic new institutions of cooperation, what TT calls the commons. Seen from this point of view, the path from the guarantee income to the commons is part of the process that, in the Italian Marxist literature that TT refers to, is called the “exodus.” In other words, the potentials expressed by the current social dynamics point to the opening of areas of self valorization and autonomous social practices that are quite different from the preceding dialectics of classes.

By now, it must be quite apparent where my preferences lie. The conceptual framework and the practice of the new commons, however, are still in their infancy. Thereare some fundamental political and theoretical issues that have to be addressed and clarified. What is the nature of commonality that it is detected in current subjective practices and proposed for future institutional forms? For instance, it is not clear to me to what extent there is a direct path from immaterial labor to the commons. Is the commons a realization of labor, albeit a labor based on cooperation rather than competition? Is it the old Marxist notion of emancipation of labor through labor? And, if so, how does it differ from the historical experience of Soviet and workers’ councils, in other ways than the heightened sociality of immaterial labor? Could it just be another version of industrial democracy, a democracy for the social factory?  If, on the contrary, it means not just exodus of labor but from labor – and from its connotations of productivity, utility and efficacy – then it would be nothing short of a redefinition of praxis itself. And maybe that is what is required today.

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 alternatives. The panel was accompanied by an installation of Web-based projects by Burak Arikan, Ursula Endlicher, Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, Aaron Koblin, Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse.

The Internet as Playground and Factory on Vimeo

RESPONSE: Paolo Carpignano
The response is offered by Paolo Carpignano, Associate Professor of Sociology and Media Studies at The New School and coordinator of the Masters/Ph.D. program in the Sociology of Media. A writer, consultant and producer for production companies in the United States, Brazil, and Italy, Carpignano has published articles on sociology, social history and media theory. He is the co-author of Crisis and Workers’ Organization and The Formation of the Mass Worker in the USA, and the author of the online project Televisuality. He is currently working on a book on the relationship between work and media.

An informal gathering among faculty, librarians and archivists of The New School who will address how notions of institutional memory and identity are created through libraries and archives. Examining the way bodies of knowledge are structured and organized, the participants will also explore possibilities for the future of information science, and consider how the social production of knowledge contributes to identity – on both the level of the individual, and in society at large.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

Drawing from critical perspectives on labor, social media, political theory, this panel discussion addresses the nature of the work of Internet users and networked workers, focusing on the relationship between invisible labor, play, exploitation, pleasure, and the production of value. What constitutes work in the digital era? What are some alternatives to the seamless corporate expropriation of value from millions of net users? Is it possible to acknowledge the moments of ruthless exploitation while not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financial and political empowerment?

As annotations to the panel, several web-based projects by artists including Burak Arikan, Jeff Crouse, Ursula Endlicher, Scott Kildall, Aaron Koblin, Stephanie Rothenberg and Victoria Scott will be installed in the same lecture hall from 5:30 p.m. onwards through the evening.

This event is presented as a prelude to “The Internet as Playground and Factory,” a conference organized by Eugene Lang faculty member Trebor Scholz that will take place at Eugene Lang College (The New School), from November 12 to 14, 2009 (www.digitallabor.org). The conference will address the massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media and confront the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes labor and value in the digital economy.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.”