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Maluka

Critic X and the Failure of International Art Criticism: a mini case study

  • Maluka M
    The job of art criticism is to provide a reflection on contemporary art practice. Art criticism does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place in the social and cultural present from which we look, and look back, at objects that are already of the past, objects that we take to define our present culture. Art critics are essentially arbiters of “cultural memory in the present.”. Who's present do they reflect and what is their agenda?
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * a mini * art criticism * case study * Critic X * Failure * international, George Kubler, Peter Osborne

Is Art History Global?

  • Maluka M
    "Is Art History Global? stages an international conversation among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. The topics are political, economic, philosophic, linguistic, and personal. Should Chinese art be discussed using Western methods such as psychoanalysis or deconstruction? Is it best to use words like "space" and "time" to describe non-Western art, or should historians try to employ the words used in different cultures? How is art history taught without books, slides, or artworks? What relevance does the Western narrative of art have for art history students in Argentina, South Africa, Indonesia, or Tibet?"
    Web Article
    Submitted
    * art theory * Global * History, Ingrid Commandeur, Stephen Wright

The Implosion of History and Context

  • Maluka M
    Too often I have come across instances where critics have used ahistorical and acontextual claims in critiquing works by artists who like myself, do not come from the centers of power in the art world. This happens often through ignorance but more often than not, through intellectual sloppiness. When work does not fit into the context that the critic is used to addressing, it can lead to a type of contextual dissonance where the artist's work is imploded into the writer's narrow, subjective assumptions.
    Web Article
    Submitted
    Africa, Branka Ćurčić, Congo, Documenta, Guy Tillim, Heidegger, Ingrid Commandeur, Okwui Enwezor, Pieter Hugo, Renzo Martens, Sean O'Hagan, SLUM TV, Stedelijk Museum, Stephen Wright