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Untitled (for Messages to the Public), 1990

Guerrilla Girls

I would like to declare why I feel that it’s now necessary to establish a new kind of art, able to show the problems of the whole society, of every living being—and how this new discipline—which I call social sculpture—can realize the future of humankind. . . . Here my idea is to declare that art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist—an artist in the sense that he can develop his own capacity.

Joseph Beuys, 1974 lecture at the New School for Social Research

#Joseph Beuys #participatory art #contemporary art

caravaggibro

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi Da. Young Sick Bacchus. Detail. 1593. Oil on canvas. Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy.

paintingispoetry

Caravaggio, Basket of Fruits, ca. 1599

the complexity of the issues involved demands much more than theoretical rigor and ideological commitment on the part of historians, critics, artists, and curators. It demands, I believe, continuous intellectual inventiveness in order to devise productive strategies of intervention where knowledge and action are bound together in unpredictable ways. It requires the ability to insistently challenge melancholic claims of the “end of art” and the nostalgic equation of artistic criticality with the historical and neo-avant-garde. It asks to retain critique not simply as a negative operation of opposition, but also as an imaginative production of possibilities within undefined boundaries of practice.

Vered Maimon responding to “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in OCTOBER 130 Fall 2009

#vered maimon #contemporary art

I am aware that I haven't returned as promised, to the question of Poussin's paint application, or not in any sustained way. I am shirking, for reasons already stated: I am fantasizing a morning when prose will be light as a feather, fast as free association, exact and heavy as a fingerprint. Dream on, as they say. But I may still get there.

TJ Clark, "the sight of death"

Art is not a set of survival skills. The city in the water Is enough of a stereotype, the city in the hill having failed us.

TJ Clark, "The Sight of Death"