Response to Grant Kester’s “The Device Laid Bare”

Grant Kester, “The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism,” e-flux journal 50 (Dec. 2013) →.

Anselm Frank, “Across the Rationalist Veil,” e-flux journal 8 (Sept. 2009) →.

Ellen Feiss, “What is Useful? The paradox of rights in Tania Bruguera’s ‘Useful Art,’” Art and Education →.

The history of challenges to the discipline, practice, and use of anthropology is far too extensive to make note of here. Anselm Frank references the work of Michael Taussig, Johannes Fabian, and Bruno Latour.

I am referring here to Stephen Wright’s work on usership, which was discussed in the context Bruguera’s Museum of Arte Útil at the Van Abbemuseum on March 15th.

See Wendy Brown, “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights,” Left Legalism/Left Critique, eds. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), 430.

As he references the work of Douglas Crimp in much of his criticism of October, it would seem reasonable to assume that Kester would be aware of how the move from the direct action of ACT UP to the current LGBT initiative for marriage rights is an instantiation of how rights discourse fundamentally structures political response—when present and when absent—and is still under-theorized, largely accepted as the end-goal of any social movement.

Targeting its international audience, the IMI project issued an “Open Invitation for Actions on International Migrants Day,” designated by the UN as December 18th. See →.