• Complain

Schwabsky - The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present

Here you can read online Schwabsky - The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: London;New York, year: 2016, publisher: Verso Books, genre: Science. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Schwabsky The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present
  • Book:
    The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Verso Books
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2016
  • City:
    London;New York
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The idea of contemporary art sometimes allows us to pretend we have made a clean break with the past. In The Perpetual Guest, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky demonstrates that any robust understanding of arts present must also account for the ongoing life and changing fortunes of its past. In surveying the art world of this past decade, Schwabsky attends not only to its most significant newer faces--among them, Kara Walker, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ai Weiwei, Chris Ofili, and Lorna Simpson--but their forebears, both recent (Jeff Wall, Nancy Spero, Dan Graham, Cindy Sherman) and more distant (Velzquez, Manet, Matisse, and the portraitists of the Renaissance). The art critic, Schwabsky writes, formalizes and deliberately exemplifes the role of the spectator who realizes the artists work, not by leaving it just as it is, but by adding something to it, making a personal contribution. Despite the hysterical pronouncements of criticisms demise, Schwabskys rich and subtle considerations of arts complexly intertwined traditions are an indispensable contribution to understanding our present moment--;I. Negative Theology -- 1. Negative Theology: Diego Velazquez -- 2. An Ambiguous Medium: Lee Ufan -- 3. The Stone Dies Away Also: Jimmie Durham -- 4. Putting the World into the World: Alighiero Boetti -- 5. The Devil, Probably: Maurizio Cattelan -- 6. A Million Little Pictures: The Pictures Generation -- 7. A Makeshift World: Thomas Demand and Bettina Pousttchi -- 8. Showing, Saying, Whistling: Lorna Simpson and Ahlam Shibli -- II. Faces out of the Crowd -- 9. Faces out of the Crowd: The Renaissance Portrait -- 10. Daring Intransigence: Gustave Courbet -- 11. Extreme Eccentrics: Modern Art and Its Collectors -- 12. Vacant, Limpid, Angelic: Willem de Kooning -- 13. Evasive Action Painter: Gerhard Richter -- 14. The Perpetual Guest: Warren Niesluchowski -- 15. Love by a Thousand Cuts: Kara Walker -- 16. Youre So Pretty: Laurel Nakadate -- 17. The Complete History of Every One: Zoe Strauss -- 18. Heroism, Hidden: Ian Wallace -- 19. Hotel Artists: Henri Matisse and Ian Wallace.

Schwabsky: author's other books


Who wrote The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

The perpetual guest art in the unfinished present - image 1

The Perpetual Guest
The Perpetual Guest
Art in the Unfinished Present

BARRY SCHWABSKY

The perpetual guest art in the unfinished present - image 2

First published by Verso 2016

Barry Schwabsky 2016

The essays collected here originally appeared in the pages

of the Nation between 2006 and 2014

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-324-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-323-5 (HB)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-325-9 (US)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-326-6 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schwabsky, Barry, author.

Title: The perpetual guest : art in the unfinished present.

Description: New York : Verso, 2016. | The essays collected here originally

appeared in the pages of the Nation between 2006 and 2014.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015042580| ISBN 9781784783235 (hardback) | ISBN

9781784783242 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Art. | BISAC: PHILOSOPHY / Political.

Classification: LCC N7445.2 .S385 2016 | DDC 700dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042580

Typeset in Perpetua by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland

Printed in the US by Maple Press

For Davida and Willa and their unfinished future

Contents

Art was no part of my milieu when I was growing up, so neither was art criticism. I must have first heard tell of that profession in the movies. I have a vague recollection of a horror film about the enmity between an artist, who declares, I live by my hand! and a critic, whose motto is, I live by my eye! After the critic murders the artist, a pair of disembodied hands takes revenge by tearing out his eyes.

And yet I remember, too, the grade-school art teacher who showed us reproductions of Picasso and Matisse. When I made a crayon drawing of some downhill skiersof course Id never seen a ski slope any more than Id met an art criticshe gave particular praise to my decision to show one of the skiers cut off by the bottom edge of the paper. She thought this was very sophisticated. I didnt understand what the big deal was. That was probably my first practical experience of art criticism. It gave me my first dim awareness that what someone sees in a picture is not necessarily just what its maker meant to put into it.

Many years later, I learned of Marcel Duchamps view, usually paraphrased as the viewer completes the work. Its a slogan I repeat regularly. More precisely, Duchamp proposed that the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. I suspect he didnt knowas I didnt until after I was already familiar with Duchamps dictumthat Walt Whitman had long before declared that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essaythe text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.

It was thus Duchamp who gave me a ready answer to an artist friend who once challenged me with the question, Why do we need art critics? After all, she continued, Scientists dont need science critics. Why is art any different? And its true, there are no science critics. Yes, scientists doing a peer review are in a sense acting as judges of their fellow scientists workbut only in a sense: they are acting as fellow practitioners, not as critics. Thats because science is not founded on this compact between maker and receiver. The art critic is a person who formalizes and deliberately exemplifies the role of the spectator who realizes the artists work, not by leaving it just as it is, but by adding something to it, making a personal contribution.

If the art critic is, as I say, merely the self-appointed representative of the spectator who is ontologically essential to arts existence, then the validity of the critics role ought to be assured. But that doesnt seem to be the case. Its not, as might have been true at times in the past, that the critic is too powerful, figuratively murdering with his evil eye the poor artist whos just trying to live by his hand. Instead, or so one gathers from all the articles and symposia on the crisis of art criticism, the critic seems to be losing all influence. The overheated, ever-expanding art market on the one hand and the explosive growth in the number of big international public exhibitions on the other has rendered the critics aesthetic judgment of taste superfluousthat seems to be the idea. The critic no longer has the power to participate in forming a consensus of value. Somewhere above his or her head, the collectors and the curators are doing that. The critic can either tag along after or get left behind altogether.

Theres some truth to this story of the critic superseded by collectors and curators. The roles and the motivations of collectors and curators are different, but they have this in common: they command material resources (private in one case, usually public in the other) that can help chosen artists to produce their work, to make a living, and to gain exposure and reputation. Critics have only words at their disposalliterally so, more and more, as the transformation of publishing by the Internet has made it ever harder for writers and journalists of any description to earn a living. And in the neoliberal economy of recent decades, with its relentless upward redistribution of wealth, money talks louder than ever, drowning out other forms of discourse.

I have to admit that the art critics loss of power doesnt worry me much. I dont see my job as mainly that of making or breaking artists reputations, or of informing collectors or curators of what they ought to like and buy. Im just as happy that they dont listen to me. I have other responsibilities toward art. The meaning of an artwork is finally independent of its price and of its exhibition history because its made and remade by anyone prepared to formulate a contribution to the creative act already embodied in it.

If there were a real crisis for criticism, it would have to do instead with an inner transformation in the nature of art itself. What if it no longer requires a public, that is, someone like the active spectator of whom Duchamp spoke? Then there really would be a conundrum, for the critic would no longer have a position from which to grasp the artwork. Its not impossible, and its not even a new idea. Back in 1966, for instance, Allan Kaprow was calling for the elimination of the audience. In recent years, in great part as a result of their revulsion from the financialization and globalization of art, more and more artists have been taking this idea more seriously, wanting to work without an audience but only with participants, collaborators, communities. Nicolas Bourriaud, in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics, quoted Flix Guattaris question, How can you bring a classroom to life as though it were an artwork? As it turns out, the question for many was more like: How can you turn an artwork into a classroom? Whether this would be worth doing is not the issue here; its that to succeed in doing soto eliminate the disinterested publicwould also be to eliminate any role for the critic. A subjective response from a participant would lack the sense of spectatorial distance essential to criticism; and an objective account would not be criticism but reportage.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present»

Look at similar books to The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present»

Discussion, reviews of the book The perpetual guest: art in the unfinished present and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.