Is Contemporary Art History?
Friday, February 28, 2014
Mellon Research Initiative
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, James B. Duke House

If a bomb had dropped on the building at 1 East 78th Street in Manhattan, the world of modern and contemporary art history would have lost its most respected and erudite scholars. KIDDING! A bomb wouldn’t even have been necessary, as the speakers and audience members who gathered for a workshop called “Is Contemporary Art History” are perfectly capable of imploding on their own. The person behind the Twitter account @AtrophicParenchyma (and a few other attendees) chronicled the meltdown last Friday at New York University’s venerable Institute of Fine Arts, using the hashtag #ifacontemporary to expose the bloated mess that is academic art history—which isn’t to say that doing so is a difficult task.

In Terms Of count: unknown (but the first eighty seconds of video below spits out the phrase three times, so proceed at your own risk).

Watch

Video from the workshop can be streamed.