The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy. This is an excerpt from Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, by Henry Giroux.
C. Wright Mills argued 50 years ago that one important measure of the demise of vibrant democracy and the corresponding impoverishment of political life can be found in the increasing inability of a society to translate private troubles to broader public issues. [1] This is an issue that both characterizes and threatens any viable notion of democracy in the United States in the current historical moment. The Feud That’s Shaking Gallery Walls. Slides into a chair in his office surrounded by proof of his “wall power”: an Andy Warhol print, a Roy Lichtenstein landscape and one of Cy Twombly’s giant squiggle paintings.
Mr. Perelman has collected art for as long as he’s been collecting companies. At the Guggenheim, Three Critical Takes on Latin America. Installation view, ‘Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today,’ Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 13–October 1, 2014 (photo by David Heald, © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) Let’s start by saying, just in case it’s not obvious, that there’s something nearly impossible about conceptualizing and mounting a show as wide in its thematic and geographic scope as Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, curated by Pablo León de la Barra. The exhibition, which is currently on view at New York’s Guggenheim Museum before moving on to São Paulo and Mexico City in 2015, would attract critics no matter where it was installed.
Néstor García Canclini: Mapa caliente para extranjeros. Arundhati Roy: How Corporate Power Converted Wealth Into Philanthropy for Social Control. August 27, 2014 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Middle-class rules deaden too many arts venues. Let's fill them with life and noise. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Illicit Drug Trade. Find more up to date articles and reports in our dossier 'Colombia: Drugs and Peace' While escalating civil conflict in Colombia is attracting increasing international interest and concern, the complex relationships between drug trafficking, political violence, and the many actors involved in the social conflict in Colombia are often absent from the debate.
This background brief provides a general overview of the relationship between the largest guerrilla group in Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia ("Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia", FARC) and illicit drug production and trafficking. “Plomo fundido” sobre la conciencia judía. “Si nosotros nos revelamos incapaces de alcanzar una cohabitación y acuerdos con los árabes, entonces no habremos aprendido estrictamente nada durante nuestros dos mil años de sufrimientos y mereceremos todo lo que llegue a sucedernos.”Albert Einstein, carta a Weismann, 1929.
¿Recuerdan cuando hace dos mil años los judíos palestinos, nuestros antepasados en Massada sitiada, enfrentaron las legiones del Imperio romano y se suicidaron en masa para no rendirse? ¿Recuerdan la rebelión popular y nacional de nuestros macabeos contra la invasión romana, cuando murieron decenas de miles de judíos y se acabó la resistencia judía en Palestina y nos dispersamos otra vez por el mundo? Recodificaciones: hacia una noción de lo político en el arte contemporáneo. Krzysztof Wodiczko.
e7.1 - Wilson Díaz. Adriana Mejía, curator Wilson Díaz’s work on the Coca plant has consisted of a long process of investigation on the plant as an aesthetic object as well as a sustained examination of its multiple meanings throughout the histories of the Americas.
By means of multiple registers and forms, Díaz highlights the plant’s uses, political manipulations, and its incessant exploitation on the part of drug traffickers in the production and commercialization of cocaine. The illicit drug trade has resulted in numerous social transformations, such as the criminalization of particular cultural practices and the association of the plant with violent contexts. Blogs.guggenheim.org/map/no-me-token-or-how-to-make-sure-we-never-lose-the-completely/ Autor Dario Escobar, Escultura Transparente 3 (Transparent Sculpture 3), 2012.
Wood, steel, plastic, and rubber, dimensions variable. Installation view: California-Pacific Triennial 2013, Orange County Museum of Art, 2013. Photo: Chris Bliss Left to right: Santiago Montoya, Horizon (I), 2012, 159.5 x 161.5 x 10 cm; Horizon (II), 2012, 160.5 x 165.5 x 10 cm; Horizon (III), 2012, 160 x 163.5 x 10 cm. All works paper money on stainless steel. GERARDO MOSQUERA: “LAS NUEVAS GENERACIONES FORZARÁN A CHILE A QUE SE ABRA MÁS” Gerardo Mosquera ha sido muy crítico de la escena del arte en Chile, calificándola, hace algunos años, de poco atrevida.
“La escena artística chilena es como un equipo de fútbol que juega bien, pero no mete goles”, dice en Copiar el Edén: Arte Reciente en Chile, el libro que editara en 2006 y que a su juicio fue “un detonante” en la internacionalización del arte chileno contemporáneo. Ahora Mosquera percibe ciertos cambios en la escena, impulsados –en su mayoría- por una visión distinta de las nuevas generaciones y un mayor apoyo a los artistas. En esta entrevista, el crítico y curador independiente afincado en La Habana habla sobre la necesidad de crear “circuitos horizontales” en el arte contemporáneo global, así como de su papel como curador de Photo España por el período 2011-2013, muestra en la que este año presenta la obra de Eugenio Dittborn, Pedro Lemebel, Juan Downey y Jorge Brantmayer.
Gerardo Mosquera por Jorge Brantmayer. The Long Nineties. The Long Nineties Art Looking Back Politics. Politics of Post-Representation. From the militarization of social media to the corporatization of the art world, Hito Steyerl’s writings represent some of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary cultural criticism today. As a documentary filmmaker, she has created multiple works addressing the widespread proliferation of images in contemporary media, deepening her engagement with the technological conditions of globalization.
Steyerl’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including documenta 12, Taipei Biennial 2010, and 7th Shanghai Biennial. She currently teaches New Media Art at Berlin University of the Arts. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. I’m old enough to remember when people thought that all geometric abstraction from Latin America was ‘airport art’, and that it represented a reactionary sell-out position. David Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture. Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview.
Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster Wallace. Twenty years ago, Wallace wrote about the impact of television on U.S. fiction. So where have we gone from irony? For the generation that came of age during Vietnam, irony was the response to a growing distrust toward anything and everything. Saltz on the Great and Powerful Simchowitz.
Stefan Simchowitz, Sith Lord. The past year has seen collectors and auction houses creating their own art market. They’re essentially bypassing dealers, galleries, and critics, identifying artists on their own, buying works by those artists cheaply in great numbers, then flipping them at vastly higher prices to a network of other like-minded speculator-collectors. Thus, we’ve seen the rise of artists in their early 20s, male painters mainly, about whom the sole topic of conversation and interest is profit margins. This annoying trend has been discussed in fits and starts — until this weekend, when the Artspace online magazine published Andrew Goldstein’s very long interview with the self-described “great collector” Stefan Simchowitz.
21 Ways Gloria Steinem Taught Us To Be Better Women. ‘Performance’, ese claro objeto del deseo. 10 Things Porn Gets Horribly Wrong About Women and Sex. September 12, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. 10 Things Porn Gets Horribly Wrong About Men. January 2, 2014 | Like this article? Join our email list: Temporal, de Tomás González. 50 Great Works of Video Art That You Can Watch Online. There are several reasons why video art is underexposed. Part of it has to do with the hard-to-shake reputation that video art is just too campy and esoteric — an opinion espoused by Jack Donaghy and anyone else who believes that art is exclusively paintings of men on horses. 2013′s unexpected lesson: Hope isn’t dead. North American cicada nymphs live underground for 17 years before they emerge as adults.