In lieu of creating something new, here are the highlights from my recent reading list:
Ben Davis’s list of the 10 Must-Read Art Essays From June 2015 was especially strong, with contributions from John Yau at Hyperallergic and the dense, well-reasoned “Those Obscure Objects of Desire” by Andrew Cole for Artforum.
Artist Angela Dufresne did double duty this month, first with her argument for bold complexity in contemporary art. She writes that “Artworks should always fuck with the mechanisms of branding and the expected. Don’t settle for the red or blue pill; find the third pill” on Art21’s blog in a piece entitled “Irony, Sincerity…Is There a Third Pill?”. Second, she presented a farewell to her gallerist Monya Rowe at Hyperallergic.
Chris Kraus interviewing Leigh Ledare at BOMB Magazine is an excellent ranging piece. I am reading her book I Love Dick currently. Reading this interview and pieces like “A walk around the neighborhood”, her intro to the book LA Artland, gives me a better sense of how she produces that narrative.
Back in late May, The Walker Art Center hosted Superscript, a conference on “Art Journalism and Criticism in the Digital Age”. Go no further if you aren’t interested in this topic! If you are, here are some of the better pieces to come out of it. The editorial reader created by the conference can be found here, but I recommend Merray Gerges “Who gets to Be a Critic?” and “The Anxiety of Being a Critic on the Internet”. Other substantial reflections on the conference were William Smith’s Art in America piece “Same As It Ever Was: A Conference on Art Criticism in the Digital Age” and for Temporary Art Review James McAnally’s Sustainability is not Solidarity: Superscript & the Economies of Art Writing.
Or if you are a glutton for punishment and/or sucker for primary documents you can read all 126 pages of transcript here.
And two book lists:
A reading list from SVA Art Criticism and Writing program website
A list of Artist Novels list by The Book Lovers. “The Book Lovers is a systematic attempt to study the phenomenon of artist novels curated by David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska.”
– Jeff Bergman July 2015
