tom moody
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The panelists for an upcoming College Art Association discussion on "Emerging Artists, Critics, and the Market" are Jeffrey Deitch, Don and Mira Rubell, Peter Plagens, and Jerry Saltz. According to an email from AICA, the critics' association organizing the event at the Hilton on Feb 17, among the questions to be addressed are:
In the current situation what, indeed, is the critic’s role and responsibility? Are there opportunities? Are there ways to respond and to act that circumvent the conventions of build-a-reputation/trash-a-reputation? What is the relationship between collectors and dealers? How does it work? Why do art world systems go unanalyzed and uncritiqued by most critics? Is there room for critics to deepen the discourse? If so how? Does it make a difference if critics expose the issues within the market, art-making and criticism? Is anyone listening? Can dealers, collectors and artists listen to critics or only to one another? Is there anything critics learn from collectors and dealers? Does it matter? Are artists so caught up in the dazzle and anxiety of early success that they can’t hear what they have to know or should a critic attempt to reach them with reasoned argument?
I quit going to these types of panels after a prominent critic told me "we can't discuss specific artists because collectors will rush out and buy them up." Here is an alternative set of questions:
1. What new forms of art have emerged since the '70s? Who are the best artists working today?
2. Have we had a "brain drain" in the art world since the days when Leo Steinberg, Rosalind Krauss, and Craig Owens wrote about their contemporaries (i.e. since about 1982)?
3. Is the art world's dedication to a relative handful of canonical (i.e., marketable) artists comparable to the "copyright tyranny" of Disney and other large corporations?
4. Won't blogging and other forms of online writing largely replace print criticism in the near future? (The publisher of the New York Times seems to think so.) How will that change art practice?
Update: Added Timesman's prognostication and link.