Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers

225 Pages·2007·3.237 MB·English

by  Diarmuid Costello, Jonathan Vickery

Art: key
contemporary
thinkers
Art: key
thinkers
Edited by
Diarmuid Costello and
contemporary
Jonathan Vickery
First published in 2007 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
© Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery 2007
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Art : key contemporary thinkers / edited by Diarmuid Costello and
Jonathan Vickery.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-319-1 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 1-84520-319-4 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-320-7 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-84520-320-8 (pbk.)
1. Art, Modern—20th century—Philosophy. 2. Art, Modern—21st
century—Philosophy. I. Costello, Diarmuid. II. Vickery, Jonathan.
N66.A76 2007
709.04—dc22
2006031856
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 184520 319 1 (Cloth)
ISBN 978 184520 320 7 (Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn
www.bergpublishers.com
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii Section II: Art Theory and History
General Introduction ix Introduction 47
Section I: Art Theory and Practice NICOLAS BOURRIAUD (1965–)
Claire Bishop 49
Introduction 3
BENJAMIN BUCHLOH (1941–)
Christine Mehring 53
DANIEL BUREN (1938–)
Melanie Mariño 5
T. J. CLARK (1943–)
Dominic Willsdon 57
DAN GRAHAM (1942–)
Eric de Bruyn 9
THIERRY DE DUVE (1944–)
Gregg Horowitz 60
MIKE KELLEY (1954–)
John Welchman 13 JAMES ELKINS (1955–)
Robert Williams 64
MARY KELLY (1941–)
Margaret Iversen 17 HAL FOSTER (1955–)
Gordon Hughes 67
JOSEPH KOSUTH (1945–)
Michael Corris 21 MICHAEL FRIED (1939–)
Stephen Melville 71
BARBARA KRUGER (1945–)
CLEMENT GREENBERG (1909–1994)
Esther Leslie 24
Diarmuid Costello 74
ROBERT MORRIS (1931–)
ROSALIND KRAUSS (1940–)
Jonathan Vickery 28
Martha Buskirk 78
ADRIAN PIPER (1948–)
W. J. T. MITCHELL (1942–)
Robert del Principe 32
Riccardo Marchi 82
ROBERT SMITHSON (1938–1973) LINDA NOCHLIN (1931–)
Dominic Rahtz 36 Francesca Berry 86
JEFF WALL (1946–) GRISELDA POLLOCK (1949–)
Stewart Martin 40 Kirstie Skinner 90
CONTENTS vI
Section III: Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics Section IV: Theory and Philosophy of Culture
Introduction 97 Introduction 147
THEODOR ADORNO (1903–1969) ROLAND BARTHES (1915–1980)
Michael Kelly 99 Nancy Shawcross 149
J. M. BERNSTEIN (1947–) GEORGES BATAILLE (1897–1961)
Espen Hammer 102 Michael Richardson 153
NOËL CARROLL (1947–) JEAN BAUDRILLARD (1929–)
Katerina Reed-Tsocha 106 Mike Gane 156
WALTER BENJAMIN (1892–1940)
STANLEY CAVELL (1926–)
Helmut Schmitz 160
Stephen Mulhall 110
PIERRE BOURDIEU (1930–2002)
ARTHUR C. DANTO (1924–)
Gordon Fyfe 164
David Carrier 114
JUDITH BUTLER (1956–)
GILLES DELEUZE (1925–1995)
Rebecca Zorach 168
Darren Ambrose 117
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926–1984)
JACQUES DERRIDA (1930–2004)
Scott Durham 172
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield 121
FREDRIC JAMESON (1934–)
GEORGE DICKIE (1926–)
David Ayers 175
Cain Samuel Todd 125
MELANIE KLEIN (1882–1960)
JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD (1924–1998)
Mignon Nixon 179
James Williams 129
JULIA KRISTEVA (1941–)
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908–1961) Sara Beardsworth 183
Alex Potts 132
NIKLAS LUHMANN (1927–1998)
ALBRECHT WELLMER (1933–) Francis Halsall 187
Ruth M. Sonderegger 136
Glossary of Key Terms 191
RICHARD WOLLHEIM (1923–2003)
Derek Matravers 140 Contributors’ Biographies 209
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank our commissioning editor Tristan Palmer at Berg for first proposing
this project, and the contributors who made it possible. Their generosity, punctuality, and
good-natured responses to numerous requests for clarifications and reformulations made
a potentially hazardous project almost manageable. Particular thanks are due to Michael
Richardson and Riccardo Marchi for contributing at shorter notice. Our gratitude also goes
to D. J. Simpson, Hannah Jamieson, Sarah Shalgosky at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts
Centre, and Sue Dibben at the Humanities Research Centre at Warwick University. The School
of Arts & Humanities at Oxford Brookes University supported work on this project prior to
Diarmuid Costello joining Warwick University, as did, indirectly, a Leverhulme Trust Research
Fellowship. In a deeper sense, we are both indebted to the Departments of Philosophy and
the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, in whose intense and congenial
atmosphere the intellectual commitments that animate this volume were formed.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
What different ways of interpreting art are there, and what different concepts and theoretical
frameworks are involved? What is the value of art? How does art communicate, embody or
otherwise express its meaning? Why does art’s form and significance change over time, and
within different contexts? Do changes in art reflect changes in culture and society as a whole,
and if so how? These are questions that continually need to be asked and reassessed. Art
itself is a ‘discourse’ – a conceptual field within which and around which move various kinds of
objects, activities, processes, ideas and theories, subcultures and movements, institutions and
exhibitions. The central characteristic of this discourse, particularly in its most recent forms,
is its unstable, internally conflicted and often bewildering character. This can make trying to
master the discourse of art a frustrating, but equally an intellectually exhilarating endeavour.
Contemporary art in particular has never enjoyed such widespread interest and currency, yet
the theoretical frameworks it produces and draws upon frequently remain opaque.
This book is a response to this situation, and is intended to put its readers in a position
to explore and question theories, ideas and claims that they might otherwise be forced to
take on trust. Of course no primer, however good, can replace reading the original texts.
But in the case of those thinkers on art considered here, some introduction is necessary to
understanding what one encounters when one does so. If this book sends its readers back to
the originals with greater confidence and curiosity, and a better sense of how a given thinker
sits within a wider field of overlapping debates, it will have served its purpose. To this end the
collection brings together upcoming younger scholars with scholars of international standing
to write in a way that is clear and approachable yet nonetheless challenging – both for the
reader and towards the thinkers and texts discussed. As such, the intention was always to
lay the ground for further critical exploration on the part of the reader. Read in this spirit,
in conjunction with the primary and secondary literature discussed, we believe that this
collection will put its readers in a much better position to develop their own perspective.
The volume spans the ideas and theories of forty-five ‘key contemporary thinkers’ on
art. What counts as ‘key’, in this context, is a matter of both judgment and the audience we
envisage, and in part hope to forge, through this collection. All such lists are partial, and there
were a number of theorists whose work we were unable to cover in the space available, much
as we would have liked to. By ‘contemporary thinkers’, we mean theorists who are associated
with a coherent body of thought or ideas, which their work on art embodies or reflects, and
whose work continues to impact on thinking about artistic practice, theory and historical
analysis today. As such, we use the term ‘contemporary’ in a fairly loose sense historically
(roughly equivalent to ‘since the 1960s’), and to signify impact rather than origins. To pick an
obvious example: Benjamin is hardly a ‘contemporary thinker’ in biographical terms (he died
in 1940), but his work has had an exceptional influence on art theory and criticism since the
late 1960s. We take the 1960s as our point of departure because it is the locus of the most
salient cultural transformation of our time – the move from modernism to postmodernism. To