Ô Paresse, mère des arts et des nobles vertus, sois le baume des angoisses humaines! —Paul Lafargue, Le droit à la paresse , 1880 Full disclosure: I grew up the son of an artist, and after more than ten years in the business, I feel it is about time I finally wrote about it. For although this reluctant resolution may simply be motivated by the mundane tragedy of my own private aging, it has become increasingly clear to me in recent years that much of my current thinking about…

What if, rather than speaking or dreaming of an absolute beginning, we speak of a leap? — Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846) 1. A couple of months ago I was invited to the historic Polish port city of Gdańsk by the Wyspa Institute of Art, the city’s leading contemporary art center, to participate in a conference on the work of locally-based artist Grzegorz Klaman—the founder, so it happens, of the art institute that was…

Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? —Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus 1. The Evanescent The “Floating World” or “Ukiyo” is the name commonly given to the demimonde of nocturnal pleasures that flourished in Edo-period Japan (1603–1868), specifically in Tokyo’s historic red-light district of Yoshiwara; this era is best remembered today for the flowering of the art of woodblock prints (“ukiyo-e”) that depict various…

Ask not what contemporary art is, but what contemporary art should be. —Oksana Pasaiko, 2009 I. “What is contemporary art?” is (clearly) not the same question as “What is art ?” The former basically asks us to define what is particularly “contemporary” about art—not, significantly enough, what is particularly artistic about it. The question of what is “contemporary” about contemporary art seems straightforward enough: answering it would simply require our…

Promontory Some weeks ago I was asked by the German quarterly journal Texte zur Kunst to contribute to their upcoming summer issue, loosely organized under the grandiose rubric of “theses on contemporary art,” whose aim would be not so much to define art, but to allow for the staking out of certain positions, which seemed especially important given the confusion resulting from the current “crisis” in the global economy. (The question as to what may happen “after the crisis”…

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. —Walter Benjamin 1 [ Preliminary admonition: there is no disgrace in seeking to define either the essence or the attributes of art. For… ] …art is, or at least can be, many things at many different points in time and space. Throughout its history—which is either long or short, depending on the definition agreed upon—it has assumed many different roles and been called upon to…