ConsecutiveMatters (a.k.a. jonathantdneil.com)

Younger Than Jesus, The New Museum’s “Generational” opens this evening.

The approach here is an interesting one, coming as it does on the heels of an art market that appeared to fetishize youth. But the curators of the new triennial, Laura Hoptman, Mas Gioni, and Lauren Cornell, assure us that what the show is meant to offer is a “snapshot” of a specific generation that for some time now has simply existed either as a catchphrase (”Millenials,” “Generation Y”) or as a demographic group for marketers. For Gioni, Younger Than Jesus is an attempt to show this generation of artists as “producers,” ones for which, as Hoptman noted, the curators have created “no ‘ism,” which is to say no conceptual corral that might makes sense of what it is that this generation of artists is up to. (That seems like a good idea, except when you remember that the very notion of a “generation” is itself a conceptual problem, though the curators and others unpack the idea in one of the shows two accompanying catalogs; more on the second one in a moment). Hoptman demurred that they (the curators, the Museum) would “leave the assessments to the sociologists, to the marketers, and to the future,” which is a nice way of confirming that they (the curators, the Museum) believe the show (and this generation) is worthy of assessments to begin with…

Read the full post on ArtReview.com

Eva Diaz has posted an excellent polemic on the false, or unstated, promises of “curatorial studies” programs over at ArtWorld Salon.  It’s worth a read…and a think.

A good discussion has been mounting on Artworld Salon pursuant to my post on the Guggenheim’s theanyspacewhatever show, which just opened this past weekend.  Here I wanted to continue one more thought:

Regarding Ina Blom’s concept of a “style site,” which she elaborates in her book of the same name, and which I have to admit I have not read, I can’t help seeing her analysis as an extension of critical accounts of Pop art, such as Hal Foster’s or Thomas Crow’s.  Whereas Foster and Crow keyed Pop to the unconscious structures and latent mechanisms of the then nascent consumer culture that was gaining traction in England and the US, Blom sees the “participatory” practices as a kind of Pop art of our nascent media culture.  Instead of the Pop image, however, now we are confronted with the “styled” environment (the exhibition hall, cafe, conference room, hotel lobby, etc.).

If participatory practices can claim any kind of semi-autonomy as an art form, then it must come from the aping of these designed and designer environments, and not just in appearance alone.  Whatever the work of art, it is clear that, to be effective, it must work on the kinds of interactions that are facilitated or determined by these “sites.”  In this, I don’t see a problem with Blom’s analysis, except that it places work of the relational persuasion in a line with, and as an extension of, Pop; and I wonder if this is the antecedent that this work requires let alone deserves.  As Alex Alberro pointed out in his talk, there is “another relationality” out there, the new-concretists in Brazil: Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Cildo Miereles and others.  These are figures of some standing, and given their historical adjacency to Fluxus in the US, and Situationism in Europe, I think it would be wiser to locate the radical anti-spectacularity of much relational and participatory work with these developments.

Might we make a distinction between critical and curatorial sensibilities? To my mind, we can–and perhaps more urgently, we must. Of course I don’t think this is necessarily a new distinction. But perhaps with a little work we can see the rise of the curator over the last decade, and the accompanying demise of the critic, as symptomatic of some more general shifts in cultural perspectives rather than as the engine driving the change. So what is this distinction? Briefly, I think it boils down to the relative values that we place on “presentation” on the one hand and “discovery” on the other.

The curatorial sensibility is focused, almost singularly, upon presentation: whether of people or things, the role of the curator is determined by gathering, packaging and exposing. And, more saliently, it takes the value of these moves to be self-evident. Often what is gathered, packaged and exposed is of secondary importance. Sure the items of interest must be seen to conform, however slightly, to the curatorial conceit, but ultimately these relationships–of items to one another and to the presentation as a whole–are simply vehicles for the presentation itself. For those possessed of a curatorial sensibility, it is valuable in and of itself that some thing, no matter what it is, has been “presented” (in the existential sense of the term, to be made “present”). If it’s here and now “for me,” then it is, by definition, good.

The critical sensibility, in contrast, is focused I believe upon “discovery.” It is the role of the critic to discover those relationships within and between any given items of interest, regardless of whether they have been gathered, packaged and exposed to the world. The conditions of presentation may enter into one’s critical perspective, but they are hardly a necessary consideration. For those possessed of a critical sensibility, then, value is to be found within or between items of interest; it is, in other words, to be “discovered,” which requires articulation in some form or another. That articulation is surely a kind of “presentation,” but the form that presentation takes is driven by the discovery itself (and yes, “presentation” may be a sufficient condition for “discovery” to occur, but it is hardly necessary, which should put to rest the argument that the fruits of the critical sensibility require those of the curatorial).

If the terms of this distinction have remained purposely abstract, it is because the division I am thinking about in no way entails the labels of “curator” or “critic” as they are applied to personalities within the world of contemporary art. Within that world alone there are curators who are uniquely possessed of a critical sensibility–e.g. Jens Hoffmann, Sara Reisman–and there are critics out there who operate under a distinctively curatorial sensibility–think of Roberta Smith’s common refrain: “artists x, y, and z are brought to mind.” No, the curatorial and critical sensibilities are just that, “sensibilities”–ways of looking at, engaging in, and thinking about the world. It is the critical sensibility that possesses Tyler Green to draw out–i.e. “discover” for his reader–the missed curatorial opportunity at the Met’s recent show of Dutch masters where Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith (1670) could have been connected to ter Brugghen’s The Crucifixion (ca. 1625); whereas it is surely the curatorial sensibility that drove the Met to gather, package and expose–i.e. to “present”–its Dutch masters in the order that the works were gifted to the museum by its benefactors (whose names, it should be mentioned, are accorded pride of place in the “presentation”).

But the critical and curatorial sensibilities are at work outside of the art world as well; in fact, I would argue that it is only once we begin to take note of these sensibilities within the larger context of what Richard Florida has attempted to carve out as the “The Creative Class” (a book shot through with the curatorial sensibility) and what MBA and media types have taken to calling “Creatives” (a term I find highly problematic at best and meaningless at worst) that we might begin to get a better idea both of how the two sensibilities differ and why they have come to do so to such a dramatic extent as of late.

[Next installment: the critical and curatorial sensibilities outside of the confines of the art world]