Discursive objects
Listening still to Boris Groys, whose ideas should by rights be central to this blog. He says: “We see artworks as incarnating art. The famous distinction between art and non-art is generally...
View ArticleNo Aura
A critic should be judged by the quotient of pain he or she can inflict. Here again is Boris Groys: “For those who devote themselves to the production of art documentation rather than artworks, art is...
View ArticleThe market in meaning
If, as Boris Groys suggests, art has definitively become discourse, then the position I laid out in the previous post must seem pretty rearguard to some. Actually, it isn’t clear yet whether the...
View ArticleDiscourse in and out of art
Boris Groys, a critic whom I respect, has described how the discursive mode has emerged in current art practice. It’s not clear whether he advocates this approach, but he describes it well. However,...
View ArticleEthics of Art
Over the last few months this blog has been circling around some ideas in aesthetics that may help to newly define the value of abstraction. Concepts such as non-identity, the inhuman and organic...
View ArticleThe Wound
The critics I respect are the ones who hurt me the most, or let’s say that they stick their fingers in the wound that already exists, the one I received from the great artists of modernism. The notion...
View ArticleDemons
Some readers might be confused by my references to demons, especially in the context of the quote from Boris Groys in an earlier post, which might leave the impression that they are personal. The...
View ArticleScience and Aesthetics
From Walter Benjamin: The place occupied in Goethe’s writings by his scientific studies is the one which in lesser artists is commonly reserved for aesthetics. This aspect of Goethe’s work can be...
View ArticleAchievement in time
Reading Boris Groys can be both enlightening and painful, not least because what he says rings so true. For example, the following words are a good description of my work: “To be an artist has now...
View ArticleInfinity of Images
Reading Groys can also be encouraging. In my case it confirms the avant-gardist qualifications of my work—surprising to me as much as anyone. One of the strongest pieces in his book Art Power is the...
View ArticleLack of Time
If time is so short, why does it feel so empty? Because time has to be shaped. What we call work. Content, or feeling in art, is a fugitive effect of the shape.
View ArticleMissed Critique
In the very important article “On the Curatorship,” from his book Art Power, Boris Groys discusses the iconoclastic power of criticism, and he says: “Contemporary iconoclasm, of course, can and should...
View ArticleNo Progress Made
I thought I’d better amplify something I said in the preceding post, about art as an agent of enlightenment—the latter meaning freedom from myth. When art definitively became a secular religion, just...
View ArticleGroys
I found an article/review on Boris Groys by Benjamin Kunkel in the London Review of Books. Overall it’s probably accurate, but I didn’t perfectly recognize Groys in some of the more summary...
View ArticleGroys’ Irony
The previous post may have seemed a little obscure to some, but I have recently found a text that illuminates Groys’ irony. A recent article on Malevich begins with the following: “…can the Russian...
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