Art Critic Research


The Importance of Art Criticism to Practice-Based Research and Questioning

“…there is a level at which art speaks directly to all of us and piques our intuitive critical sensibilities. We’re entitled to hold both informed and uninformed opinions, since once the art is out in the world, it belongs equally to everyone. Sometimes we have to risk being wrong, but must at least make a valiant argument. ”

https://brooklynrail.org/2012/12/artseen/whats-so-important-about-criticism-macadam

art criticism and the art critic:


Art criticism, the analysis and evaluation of works of art. More subtly, art criticism is often tied to theory; it is interpretive, involving the effort to understand a particular work of art from a theoretical perspective and to establish its significance in the history of art.
The critic is “minimally required to be a connoisseur,” which means he must have a “sound knowledge” of the history of art, as Philip Weissman wrote in his essay “The Psychology of the Critic and Psychological Criticism” (1962), but “the step from connoisseur to critic implies the progression from knowledge to judgment.” 

Amelia Jones
Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's 'Dinner Party' in Feminist Art History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998.
Warr, Tracey and Amelia Jones (eds.). The Artist's Body. London: Phaidon, 2000.
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.
Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject. New York: Routledge, 2006.
“The Artist is Present”: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence. TDR, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring 2011), p. 16-45. Posted Online February 16, 2011.[9]
Heathfield, Adrian and Amelia Jones (eds.). Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 2012.
"Sexuality" London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2014.
Silver, Erin and Amelia Jones (eds.). Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.

“This paper, which draws on the works exhibited in the 2013 exhibition I organized in Montreal (“Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art”), makes use of thing theory, aesthetic theory, and theories of immaterial labor to examine a trend in contemporary art towards returning to manual creative processes and explicitly “worked” materials. Looking at a range of practices foregrounding what I call the “having been made” of the work of art, I argue that such practices afford us an opportunity to address transformed structures of labor in contemporary society—specifically the interrelations among processes of making (or labor) and the materialities transformed and animated throughthese processes—and thus point to new configurations of subject-object relations and new modes of engagement that enliven rather than shut down a range of affective and embodied interpretive moments. In this way, the artists’ negotiation of aspects of immaterial labor allows for future spectators (or “experiencers”) to rethinkour own relationship to viewing and interpreting and assigning value to the images and things we engage.” Jones https://artandperformance.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/amelia-jones-material-traces-contemporary-art-dematerialization-and-the-animating-force-of-labor/



...a video to watch about this exhibition, material traces...

CLAIRE BISHOP
PhD, Essex University, 2002

Research Interests:  Contemporary Art and Theory
Professor of Contemporary Art
Professor Claire Bishop joined the Graduate Center in 2008, after teaching at Warwick University (UK) and the Royal College of Art, London. Her books have been translated into over seventeen languages, and she is a regular contributor to Artforum. Her current research addresses the impact of digital technologies on contemporary art, as well as questions of amateurism and 'de-skilling' in contemporary dance and performance art.


KEY TEXTS FOR RESEARCHING BISHOP'S WRITING
Radical Museology, or, What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? Koenig Books, 2013
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso 2012
1968/1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change, Proceedings of a conference I organized in Warsaw in Summer 2008, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw 2010
Double Agent, Exhibition catalogue for 2008 exhibition at ICA London + tour, ICA London2009
Participation,Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press, 2006
Installation Art: A Critical History Publisher: Tate Publishing/Routledge
2005

History Depletes Itself, A critical review of Danh Vo's exhibitions "mothertongue" and "Slip of the Tongue" at the 2015 Venice Biennale Contemporary Art and Curating contemporary art, in ArtforumSep 2015
Dance in the Museum, Three institutional histories of dance in the museum from the 1930s to the present day: Tate, MoMA and Whitney. Performance Art, Dance, and Museums, Dec 2014 in Dance Research Journal
Reconstruction Era: The Anachronic Time(s) of Installation Art, Installation Art, Art Reconstructions, Fondazione Prada, 2013
Publication Name: Revisiting When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 (ed. Germano Celant)
"The Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media." Artforum, September 2012.
Unhappy Days in the Art World: Deskilling Theatre, Reskilling Performance, Performance Art and Dance, Dec 2011, Brooklyn Rail
"Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity." October, no. 140 (Spring 2012).
What is a Curator? Contemporary Art, Curating, and History of Exhibitions, issue #26, 2007, IDEA
 1968-1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2010.
 Double Agent. London: ICA, 2009.
"The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents." Artforum, February 2006.
Participation. London: Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2006.
Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate, 2005.
"Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." October, no.110 (Fall 2004).



But is it installation art?
Claire Bishop
1 January 2005
Tate Etc. issue 3: Spring 2005

http://clairebishopresearch.blogspot.com/
http://gc-cuny.academia.edu/ClaireBishop



User's Guide
This isn't really a blog, more of an online archive of my publications, articles, talks, conferences, and so on. For pdfs of my writing, see my page at academia.edu

About me: I am a professor in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, where I've been based since 2008. Previously I taught at Warwick University (2006-8), at the Royal College of Art, London (2001-6) and at Essex University, where I completed my PhD in 2002. I can be contacted on cbishop@gc.cuny.edu.
- CB







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