MSB brainstorming

05 January 2014

Critic John Perreault, Excellent Once, Twice, Thrice Again

First published September 17, 2007

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Recent Blog on Artopia about Editing: “Jack Kerouac, Pousette-Dart, and Me,” link

Recent Essay on “The Braid: A New Paradigm for Art” in the online journal theArtSection, Go to archive: Vol.1, No.3 (Aug.07), link.

Recent Podcast on PS1’s “Art Radio” Podcast site: link.

A taster:

In the summer of 2004 when I was teaching an introduction to contemporary art at the Anderson Ranch near Aspen, in Colorado, I came up with two ideas that I felt would help make sense of the confusion that prevails. Are we in a post-pluralist free-fall? Which direction is up? Who threw out the baby with the bath?

I was not convinced that art history and the art world were finished, yet the art world seemed at an impasse. Pluralism, long confused with anti-Leninist socialisms or, on an even deeper level, with polytheism, had been cast aside. Art was tied up in a knot, with no clear prerogatives and certainly without direction. But the term “direction” implies the dreaded Master Narrative that we have all tried to deconstruct, inadvertently letting it be replaced by…..the Market?

Perhaps it was not the end of art history, but the end of a certain restricted art history. Perhaps it was not the end of the art world, but the end of a certain kind of art world. I, of course, knew it was all rhetoric. Or as the Dadaists used to say, art is dead; long live art...........

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