|
Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
View current page
...more recent posts
This eveing I attended a packed out panel discussion that attempted to address the following questions: "Is art criticism still able to galvanize debate or has its effectiveness been diminished? Or are there no issues? Is the art system now too complex for debate, or has the art community advanced beyond this need, having found other ways and forms of engaging discussion?"
Highlights include the following quotes:
panelist Mark Cheetham: Debate needs a context of contestation, and that needs to be staged.
panelist Sarah Milroy: The citadel has fallen to the art-hungry hordes.
panelist Catherine Osborne: Assumed knowledge is a failing.
The panel was lopsided in favour of journalism and accessibility (two things that I like), and therefore art criticism per se (another thing that I like) did not get a fair kick at the can. Philip Monk apparently felt that his role as moderator prevented him from truly advocating for the 'lost' discourse. Some riled-up audience members such as Andy Patton, Xandra Eden, Jessica Wyman and John Bentley Mays, spoke up for critique, but in the end Monk, somewhat fatalistically*, declared a consensus that art criticism is irrelevant, and the statement was met with an overall sense of quiet, defeated resignation. Ouch!
I told someone the other day, dismayed at my lack of a master's degree, that I got my learnin' at the school of hard knocks. HAh. Not true. I'm basically uneducated. But I do occasionally read (and also sometimes publish) art theory and criticism. My budding series of Canadian art quotes ( 1 / 2 / 3 / and JR ) is a tiny testament to the peaks of the discourse that have inspired me along the way. Reading art criticism (and here I will melt art theory into the same puddle, tho I know there's a distinction) may be the provenance of freaks and social deviants ...but I know you are out there!
Join me and post your favourite art criticism and theory quotes (with bibliographic citations, please) in the comment section below.
*or mabye he's right, and I'm a Pollyanna. Okay okay ... I am a Pollyanna. But that doesn't mean he's right!
|
|
Excerpt from the Toward a Science of Consciousness III (MIT Press), introduction to section VIII: The Timing of Conscious Experience, by Stuart R. Hameroff
[...] Libet concluded that somehow the brain appreciated sensory input after a significant delay but corrected the timing by referring the conscious signal backward in time! Libet's data and conclusions have been widely debated, with quite different interpretations. Some physicists take the backward time referral seriously, as supportive evidence for a quantum mechanism in consciousness. Others believe classical, nonquantum explanations suffice. The debate continues in the first two chapters in this section.This set of articles has been bugging me since I read the book last fall. Had no idea they were online!
I watched the adult anime (hentai) Nightmare Campus the other day. The end is pretty hilarious, with a gigantoid penis that rises up out of the planet, with a little tiny tiny girl wiggling around on top of it. But what I keep thinking about is the images of nuclear explosions - a giant white flash, a dome of light/force that explodes into cataclysm. Is the whole cosmic rebirth phenomenon in anime related to the fact that Japan was victim of nuclear bombs? Am I stupid to be only really thinking about this now...? or is there something weird and blinkered about the fact that we in North America fetishize all things Japanese, and carry our own embedded nuclear nostalgia paranoia, but do not talk about a Japanese internalization of nuclear holocaust?