Contemporary

Art pedagogy

Nineteen eighty-four, the year this magazine was founded, marked the end of an era. In February of that year Pierre Trudeau announced his retirement; subsequently, Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives were elected in a landslide. We all know what happened next. The election of the Mulroney government ushered in an era of wildly unfettered capitalism, which may now be…

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Reviews

Do curators need university curatorial programs?

The hyperbole that seems to accompany many negative reactions to new curatorial studies programs is based on one contentious, heavily debated theory: you can’t teach someone to curate. For critics, these degrees are like doing condensed med school studies by online correspondence: Web-conference in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for six months, and we’ll let you cut people open. A curatorial…

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Contemporary

No typical donor

This year, the Power Ball, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s biggest annual fundraising event and one described by society pages and fashion media as the “official launch of the summer social season,” added an Artist Ambassadors ticket package to its sponsorship options. A response to arguments that few artists can afford to attend the event at $160 general admission…

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Art

The state of art criticism and critical theory

Oscar Wilde’s famous quip that “The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is unread” partially applies to art criticism. The problem with most art criticism is that it is both unreadable and unread. Paradoxically, however, as an obscure subculture of writing, art criticism appears in a truly large number of venues: several hundred international…

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Art

Art diasporas

The French philosopher Henri Bergson defines the present as “ungraspable … the past devouring the future: It’s a conceptualization that suggests turmoil, flux and the idea of “a gap”; or maybe, not a gap so much as the impression of what we construct in place of not being able to “grasp” it. If we exist between “then” and “when” the…

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Contemporary

The National Campaign

Including work by Center for Tactical Magic, Luca Frei, Pia Lindman, Carlos Motta, Duke Riley, Chris Sollars, Allison Smith, Mark Tribe, United Victorian Workers Union, Organized by Creative Time; curated by Nato Thompson, Park Avenue Armory, New York Creative Time’s June–September project Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008) ended in a ‘convergence’ of over 40 artists presenting artworks, performances,…

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Contemporary

It’s Time, Man. It Feels Imminent

From May to October of this year, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London undertook an extended 60th anniversary program. Nought to Sixty operated under a straightforward premise: the institution presented 60 projects in six months from artists and art centres based in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The backbone of the program rested on two solo exhibitions that…

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Exhibitions

TAKE YOUR TIME: OLAFUR ELIASSON

Take your time is a grand staging of 38 Olafur Eliasson sculptures and installations at the Museum of Modern Art and PSI Contemporary Art Center in New York. Organized in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the show brings to a North American audience a large selection of the Danish-Icelandic artist’s immersive artworks(check out cageymishap9384.deviantart.com), which reference…

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Exhibitions

Geoffrey Farmer

It’s no secret that Vancouver artists enjoy special status in Europe. Recent programming at Rotterdam’s Witte de With provides evidence of this phenomenon. Sandwiched between last year’s Brian Jungen exhibition and an upcoming show of Ian Wallace’s work are simultaneous exhibitions by Geoffrey Farmer and Gareth Moore. While this year has been particularly good to Farmer, with a mid-career survey…

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Exhibitions

THE MYSTICS AND THE PASSIONS

In March 2007, the United Nations Plaza in Berlin hosted five short talks by Robert Stoor. They mostly dealt with the relationship between politics and art, but also with the proliferation of discourse about art, where this discourse might take place and how it should develop in the future. He explained: “What I think is important to look at ……

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