From the Chair

Apr 9, 2018 | Essay, From the Chair

I gave a lecture to my Contemporary Art History class recently called Slippages and Resets: Re-booting Identity and Jump-starting the Art World. It begins with a performative, photographic self-portrait by the artist Renee Cox, Yo Mama, from 1993. It is a self...

From the Chair

Apr 2, 2018 | Essay, From the Chair

I want my students to know everything that I know; all of the history of contemporary art, all of the annotations of that history, all the artists that inspired and continue to inspire me, the films, exhibitions, and cultural events I have witnessed. I want them to...

From the Chair

Mar 19, 2018 | Essay, From the Chair

I was recently asked if I had a definition for the word art. I think, speak, and write about art constantly, but the question was, at the moment it was asked, unanswerable. I realized later that such a question is perhaps always lurking behind our conversations about...

From the Chair

Mar 12, 2018 | Essay, From the Chair

I have a copy of a book written in 1982 by the artist Robert Irwin, with which I have recently re‐engaged, called Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. I borrowed the title for a chapter in my own book in order to allude to Irwin’s idea that an...

From the Chair

Mar 5, 2018 | Essay, From the Chair

Tribalism. It’s a word that seems to be used, in the current moment, to describe any number of groups of which one feels an affinity for. Tribal by choice or by birth, by circumstance or by situation, all are possible organizing methods for contemporary...

From the Chair

Feb 26, 2018 | Essay, From the Chair

Museums are perhaps the most comforting spaces for me. Full of objects and art, thoughtfully arranged and displayed and, depending on the choices of the curators, often exhilarating to pass through. While museums vary in architectural style and in the type of objects...