Richard Shiff

The Necessity of Jimmie Durham's Jokes

When patterns of commerce between cultures acquire regulation, noncommercial effects often follow, since exchanges of this sort involve identities as well as goods and money. A case in point is the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, passed into law November 29, 1990. It specifies what can be represented as “United States Indian products,” as distinguished from all works resembling or imitating them, which might otherwise be sold on the same market. Why did the Indian art market, far removed from what is usually considered “big business,” merit its own regulation and protection? Sales of Indian artifacts have actually grown so great that significant commercial interests are at stake; although Native Americans control only a portion of this market, a large number make their living as producers of Indian arts and crafts.

Art History and the Nineteenth Century: Realism and Resistance

Skilled workers have cause to believe that they profit from professional clannishness. They know that sharing the se-crets of a trade or method with outsiders risks diluting the market for the corresponding product or service. If too many get involved in the same kind of work, not only does supply exceed demand, but the possibility of independent invention and “modernization” increases, along with the likelihood that the parameters of the entire enterprise may shift dramatically. The changes that often accompany such unregulated activity in a field may be what we call progress - or perhaps they merely represent an aspect of the myth of progress.

The subject in/of art history

Part of a symposium on the subject in art history and the subject of art history. The writer notes that recent art history postulates that subjects are constructed in relation to artworks. He argues that the idea of a subject-constituting artwork, in its strong and specific form, is false. More precisely, he contends that artworks are subject-constituting for reasons that are largely unrelated, and historically prior, to their production as artworks.

Every Shiny Object Wants an Infant Who Will Love It

In Marfa, Texas, during the 1980s, Donald Judd installed one hundred boxlike objects, each with the same exterior dimensions—forty-one inches high, with a base of fifty-one by seventy-two inches. Structural features of these objects vary, so that each is unique. For example, a unit might be divided by an interior vertical plane or by an interior horizontal, and the division might occur in full or in part.

On Criticism Handling History

to certify their very existence. Consider, for example, the status of events, including not only uniquely consequential happenings, but also recurring practices, customary behaviour patterns, and even personal habits. We might argue that such historical events, which often constitute much of the raw material of political and social histories, possess only the stability that discourse provides; an event that passes unremarked is hardly an ’event’ at all. By comparison, certain other objects of historical investigation seem to live through time whether noticed or not, actively engaging history under special conditions. We include among such objects nature’s creations (for instance, the phylloxera that entered history by contributing to economic crisis in nineteenth-century France) as well

De Kooning: The Kick, the Twist, the Woman, the Rowboat

As a painter of the human figure, Willem de Kooning was unusual among the New York School artists. He had no commitment to abstract (non-figurative, non-representational) art, and even spoke agains...

Watch Out for Thinking (Even Fuzzy Thinking): Concept and Percept in Modern Art

This article, a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” documents how some modern artists and critics have argued against any sort of verbal thinking about art. Beyond describing works of visual art and pronouncing on their relative quality, critics often assume responsibility for explaining what a given work means. Because paintings and sculptures are less precisely codified, less articulate, than verbalized communications, they may seem to require verbal translation. Yet some artists and critics have warned that the advantageous emotional force of a visual presentation is diminished or even destroyed by the generalizing classifications that verbal thinking entails. Sensation suffers from any reconstitution in words. “Watch Out for Thinking” focuses on the views of two critics (Clement Greenberg, Charles Harrison) and two artists (Willem de Kooning, Donald Judd), each of whom was sympathetic to the principle that visual observation and expression should remain independent of verbal explanation. Their common principle required that each develop some method of dealing with the gap between the experience of sensation and the thoughts generated by or directed at such feeling. On this issue, each disagreed with the others, whether expressing his difference directly or indirectly; and the differences often hinged on matters of aesthetic judgment. Ironically, the practice of such judgment demanded verbal concepts for its articulation. In turn, the verbal discourse tended to render the initial aesthetic judgment more extreme, more polarizing, than it may have felt as a lived response to a specific work of art. To remedy the situation, a viewer might allow feeling to divert the logical course of thinking.

Regarding Art and Art History: Unexplained

ion. Curator James Johnson Sweeney initiated commentary on de Kooning’s Painting (1948; Fig. 2), admiring 1 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Girl before a Mirror, March 1932, oil on canvas, 64 511⁄4 in. (162.3 130.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim (artwork