Once it must have been pretty, but now it is exquisite.
—
James Elkins referring to a Song Dynasty tea bowl IN James Elkins (2002) Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics, p. 22
Fabian Burgy (2013) Spikes
This is wonderful writing: judicious, measured, improvisational.
—
James Elkin (2008) On the Absence of Judgement in Art Criticism
Jenny Odell - All the People in Dolores Park
Jenny Odell has painstakingly used Google Maps (her preferred medium) to isolate every individual present at the park that day. The word ‘tediousness’ is probably the word that I would use to describe the central theme of her practice. In her other words, the record of urban fragments playfully retrieved from Google Maps is reminiscent of the typological photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Art is not a physical category, it is a social construct.
—
Amy Goldin (1969) Deep Art and Shallow Art, New American Review #4 p. 102
I feel as though Goldin has had the last word on “what is art” in this blatantly simple statement. Now, let’s all move on.
Tadao Cern (2012) Blow Job
Tadao Cern’s humour undermines our expectation of the term, “blow job”, without entrenching the audience in tiresome aspirations to “deconstruct” social stereotypes of women.
Artistic meaning cannot be created by fiat. Even if the artist says that he wants his work to be interpreted in some particular way, his expressed intentions do not constitute a rule that establishes meaning.
—Amy Goldin (1969) Deep Art and Shallow Art, New American Review #4
Anton Kannemeyer (2011)
Anyone know what this piece is called?
What is new and curious about postmodernism is that it is an anti-rationalist form of thought that has seduced part of the left.
—
Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont (1955) Fashionable nonsense: postmodern intellectuals’ abuse of science, New York- Picador, p. 198
Hugh Davis (2013) Follicles of Fancy
