n.e.w.s. is a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, drawing upon contributions from around the globe, bringing together different voices, accents and outlooks from the North, East, West and South. | Read more..

n.e.w.s. at Khoj@1Shanthi Road

Friday, 20. November 2009 | 20:00 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)
khoj1shanthiroadoverview2
khoj1shanthiroadoverview2
khoj1shanthiroadoverview2

At Khoj@1Shanti Road , n.e.w.s. (Stephen Wright, Prayas Abhinav, Renée Ridgway) made a public presentation of recent projects in India and discussed the research for their forthcoming book, Arbitrating Attention: reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds that seeks to rethink the social and economic conditions of art. As twenty-first century attention economics maintains its momentum, where an artist's standing in the reputational economy is determined by his or her coefficient of specific visibility, how can shadowy, more poly-vocal initiatives at the edges find ways to surface, or, for that matter, to remain hidden? What are the specific new vocabularies, technologies even, with respect to modes of transmitting knowledge that might be used as deframing devices?n.e.w.s. contributor Stephen Wright gave a lecture on the above, along with citing some key art historical paradigms and showing images of these works. This user-friendly presentation focused on a cross-section of contemporary, incidentally artistic practices, whose coefficient of artistic visibility is deliberately impaired, situating them with regard to earlier conceptual practices of the 1970s, drawing some conclusions about the prospects of art after spectatorship.‘Art, incidentally, is redundant… but that should not be seen as its doom, but rather as its great fortune. It is redundant in that it has, bit by bit, done away with all material and perceptual externality with respect to other forms of human activity; it has sundered itself from everything – all the generic, geographic and other essentializing moorings that continued to fetter it throughout the twentieth century – except it own histories and self-understanding.’