R.I.P. The Cultural Turn, C. 1968-2016
If there's a reintroduction of politics (and not pseudo-political culture) in 2016 — something many of us have not seen in our lifetime — there will be a dramatic change in the way art is made in the coming years.
Contradiction and Possibility
The veil has been lifted on the sensually expressed neoliberal ideals of being alright.
“Political” Art: A Failed Project
Are we to accept that the field of artistic production — unique in its capacity to butt up against the world as it is and imagine a world as it should be — offers only an endorsement for a political stalwart?
Anne Imhof: Angst II @ Hamburger Bahnhof
And yet, the content and meaning of Angst II is excruciatingly difficult to define. The impulse to try to make the irrational moments — or the whole — meaningful is constantly frustrated.
Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room @ The New Museum
“The Waiting Room” is remarkable for its lack of concern with its institutional home and its disregard for questions of aesthetics.
Against the "Critical Criticism" of Culture: Towards an Aesthetics of Blindness
What role can criticism possibly play in completing works of art, or “fulfilling” them?
TEEN: Love Yes
A critic might try to pluck TEEN from the growing heap of dance-pop bands and salvage their music by dissecting it scientifically.
London Symphony Orchestra Percussion Ensemble / Steve Reich: Sextet; Clapping Music; Music for Pieces of Wood
Within the essence of postmodern music is embedded a struggle with the necessity to toil against the interpretative and compositional standards of the status quo, and simultaneously, a fundamental confusion about how best to accomplish this.
The Limits of Kitsch Criticism
Modern criticism developed when art became serious and demanded thought. Yet the vast majority of our culture today isn't meant to be seriously thought about.
"Capital: Debt - Territory - Utopia" @ Hamburger Bahnhof
For religious anti-capitalism, then, the sinful sides of capital must be rejected; for Koons’s affirmative postmodern attitude, you can’t but embrace them.
Criticism & Ambivalence
The new phenomenon of artists and critics eagerly hatching their careers, quickly cobbling together movements for their resumes, and planning for their retrospectives before they have anything to say, may sound vulgarly affirmative to those reared in the ‘60s communes or the ‘70s DIY subcultures.
A Stopping Place
The text gets lost in rhetorical questions, cliché, and telling the audience what it is not about.
Miyamoto and Balcou: Breaking Historical Amnesia and Critical Gallery Practice
The task of the artist (or art critic for that matter) is perhaps not to avoid categories, but rather to temporarily show that all of them are in fact ambiguous because all of them change before our eyes, regardless of us.
Autechre: Elseq 1-5
It is affectless electronic music at its best, and it is an exegesis of self-cancellation.
Christian Jankowski Storms the House of Art
Jankowski keeps trying to grapple with the problematic relationship art has to society even though he cannot offer a solution.
Undeleting Garden of Delete: A Critical Intervention
Garden of Delete is the “determinate negation” of the Garden of Eden, whose claim to innocence it debunks.
Joseph Bertolozzi: Tower Music
The sounds of the tower, both percussed and ambient, are the most interesting dimensions of this project; yet, they are also what become the most compromised through Bertolozzi’s treatment of them.
Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of Delete
Oneohtrix Point Never is the highest expression of the art of middlebrow pastiche.
Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool
With A Moon Shaped Pool, the band has officially transitioned from ostensible aesthetic activity to political pseudo-activity.
The People v. O.J. Simpson
How then, in 1994, did O.J. become the posterchild for “racial justice” against the LAPD? How did his acquittal convincingly offer any sense of hope to black people across America?