Colloquium on “CONTEMPORANIETY AS A QUALITY OF OUR WORLD PICTURE”
Presenter: Dr. Terry Smith, Andrew W Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, Henry Clay Frick Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Kenneth P Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.
Bio: TERRY SMITH, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. In 2010 he was named Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate by the Australian Government, and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). He is the author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America(University of Chicago Press, 1993; inaugural Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize 2009); Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, and volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006),What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009),Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), and Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2012).
Abstract of “CONTEMPORANIETY AS A QUALITY OF OUR WORLD PICTURE”: After the apparent end of modernity, and the recession of postmodernity, what are we to make of the widespread recent insistence on the contemporary moment as definitive of present and (most) imaginable ways of being-in-the-world? Three recent essays by Terry Smith pose this question, and comment on responses to it by a number of artists, and by thinkers including Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Colloquium participants should read one or more of the files below before the event:
- A pdf of the Introduction to Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezorand Nancy Condee eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
- Understanding Contemporary; Contemporaneity" Keywords Project, posted October 2012.
- "Agamben and Nancy on Contemporaneity and Art," unpublished ms. March 2012.
For inquiries concerning CIQR, please contact the Center Coordinator, Fred Evans, Dept. of Philosophy, evansf@duq.edu, 396-6507, or access the CIQR website.