I don’t remember who it was, but a long time ago there was a famous instance of an art critic complaining that there is no place from which to review a Bill T. Jones piece on the topic of AIDS, as it was, after all, on the topic of AIDS. I can see the discomfort of a “hands up” in this instance.

But not necessarily with regard to collector-owned non-profits. In fact, I do think there is an obligation to attend to the eccentricities of such institutions, as you indicate here with regard to “identity.” It is not a petty move at all. More worrisome might be that it’s just not that interesting.

I have not seen the collection personally, but there is a pretty good website, and I have interviewed Coetzee. He emphasized the notion that patrons are no longer comfortable just to write a check, they want to shape the discourse, and isn’t it important to address that shaping? To worry about being called petty in doing so is for you to allow the discourse to be reduced to character defamation – don’t stand for it.

My own desires for knowledge to become visible as an achieved and histroical form are similar, but I think that, with some unhappiness, I’m closer to finding what you call patterns of behaviour (manifestations of thought) closer to that savvy layer of visual culture, in gallery give-aways and such.

I don’t know that I’m interested in the quantitative, per se, but I do know that things have reached such a scale and that things are changing so rapidly, that the little gallery reviews just don’t cut it any more, as much as I love to write them.

Donovan, as you note, is opportunistic I admit, and I look to her mostly because some of her work is demonstrative of emergence in its physical manifestation. As I look at what’s necessary to conceive of this concept as an operative one in the field of history and criticism, however, I realize that my Donovan example won’t hold. But for the time being, I still like it.

Perhaps the thing to do, then, is to attempt to recognize these patterns of behavior (in artistic, curatorial, critical and historical practice) and to see at what point the numbers themselves (practitioners; entities) begin to count. This may seem too quantitative for some, but I think that’s the interesting thing; as historians and critics, we’re very bad with the quantitative, but here’s a concept that offers us a way of thinking the quantitative and qualitative in conjunction (which is also a way of thinking the temporal and the synchronic together too).

I’m curious about the following:

“In terms of criticism, emergence would require that we begin to look at entire populations of agents and objects rather than continuing to focus on those agents and objects alone.”

I regard this as my own practice, and it really doesn’t find its place in the critical establishment, which is why I prefer to write on a blog. But let’s say that the above statement won’t necessarily lead to what you seem to call emergence – for example, my pieces on what I got for free, and the sublime/picturesque, both investigate, differently, “entire populations,” but I don’t think they line up adequately to what you want emergence to be. Can you say more about what emergence does as a form of criticism?

Can you elaborate on how Tara Donovan’s repeated name is something other than historical reflection? I see what you are after, and it is quite beautiful, but I am asking for it to be extended beyond the level of very lucky opportunism and to support this rather huge claim for a paradigmatic shift (?) – which I would be very happy for you to name.

On Artworld Salon not too far back I mentioned a work by Pisano, called “A sculpture turning into a conversation,” that was just this sort of investigation/construction of a fictive object – the conversation itself became what she was referring to as a sculpture. It sounds like, from her perspective, this fiction is not criticism at all.

To get back on point, the writing on the early ‘land art’ exhibition at Cornell in the late 60s, and anything that covered Robert Barry’s first conceptual pieces, push this point about experience to the limit. Eric is right to note, however, that there always has to be a ‘first responder’ of sorts, an initial account, the remit of which is to convey just what it is that is experienced (even if that experience is one of denial). But here’s my question: why are we so convinced that THAT is criticism?