In Terms Of

Tag: Creative Time

  • Paying Artists, from MoMA to Momenta Art

    W.A.G.E.: How Creative Labor Should Be Compensated
    Thursday, December 11, 2014
    CUE Art Foundation
    Joan Mitchell Foundation, Art Education Center,     New York

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    Lise Soskolne, W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, provides an overview of her organization

    Based in New York, the six-year-old advocacy group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has supported a single issue: payment to artists working with nonprofit organizations in visual art. Three months ago W.A.G.E. launched a voluntary certification program for institutions that wish to publicly signal their commitment to compensating artists for their work in exhibitions and for speaking engagements and writing, among other things. The group also debuted a fee calculator that establishes a minimum wage, so to speak, for creative labor, as well as a progressively scaled payment schedule based on an institution’s annual operating expenses.

    Tonight’s event, organized by Cevan Castle, the Cue Art Foundation’s public programming fellow, featured W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, Lise Soskolne, who gave an overview of her organization’s mission and its past and current activities. The talk had been sold out via an online RSVP, but the room was surprisingly half empty—with an unfortunately high number of no-shows for such an important subject.

    Nonprofits are subsidized while the market is not, Soskolne explained, and nonprofits have a moral authority and responsibility. “They are also charities,” she said with seriousness, “but artists are not charity cases.” Museums give value to art, the claim goes, which is capitalized on by the art market and art auctions. Many artists fail to benefit from this value, but institutional barriers aren’t always to blame. Soskolne identified four “irresolvable contradictions” regarding attitudes on remuneration that often come from creators themselves: (1) the conflict between the nonmonetary value of art versus the labor and compensation needed to earn a living; (2) operating outside the system to be critical of it versus selling out; (3) being either an eccentric radical or an agent of gentrification; and (4) building cultural and social capital during an artist’s emerging years versus the diminishing need for it as a career progresses. W.A.G.E. exists to correct these misconceptions.

    wageintroduction
    Lise Soskolne introduced by Cevan Castle

    W.A.G.E.’s fee calculator and certification program were based, in part, on feedback from a 2010–11 survey, which collected data from a questionnaire about the payment practices of nonprofits based in New York City. According to the survey report, published in 2012, approximately 58 percent of respondents confirmed that they did not get paid. “We didn’t set out to shame anyone in particular,” Soskolne said, though it’s clear that Performa finds it extremely difficult to recompense the artists who bring this biennial of performance art to life.1 By contrast, the two organizations that pay artists most frequently are the Kitchen and Creative Time, which, along with Performa, are the key players in the interdisciplinary art and performance milieus. “Without content,” Soskolne reminded us, “these institutions would cease to function.”

    The venerated institution Artists Space, where Soskolne was a grant writer for many years, partnered early with W.A.G.E. and allowed her access to its financial history. Through this and other research, W.A.G.E. came to recognize that a line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget is an essential characteristic of its cause. In fact, when W.A.G.E. was asked to participate in a 2010–11 exhibition called Free, organized by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the group worked behind the scenes to negotiate payment for all other included artists instead of having a presence in the galleries. The $150 per person was not much, Soskolne said, but was more than just a token gesture. A line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget—separate from production or installation costs—is now a required criterion for certification. Later in her talk, Soskolne importantly insisted that W.A.G.E. is not an art project, despite past encouragement by others who think the organization might cash in on grant money to sustain its work. As a 501(c)(3), W.A.G.E. is eligible for different types of funding opportunities, an advantageous position since government agencies are more likely to fund a nonprofit that a collective of artists.

    The solo exhibition is the anchor of the fee calculator, Soskolne said, which sets a minimum wage (called a “floor wage”). The calculator also considers an organization’s annual operating expenses to determine progressively higher payments. There is one caveat: what’s called the “Koons ceiling” creates a cap on artist’s fees and ensures, at places like the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, that “artists should not be getting paid more than the curator.” But sometimes modest nonprofits end up shelling out a higher percentage of their budgets for artist’s fees, according to the formula. “The smaller organizations tend to take better care of artists,” Soskolne acknowledged, but firmly stated, “If there’s no minimum, there’s no place to start from.” Larger organizations, she said, spend money on things like conservation, which smaller groups need not consider. But since larger institutions tend to increasingly accumulate more money and power, Soskolne argued that public funders such as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts should concentrate on subsidizing smaller groups. When asked later about fees from university galleries and museums, Soskolne admitted that it’s hard to extract their allocations from their parent school’s budgets.

    W.A.G.E. certification, whether implemented or not, may play a positive role in getting institutions to radically rethink their finances—especially in places like Art in General, for example, where the executive director’s salary comprises 21 percent of its annual operating expenses. Soskolne said that one institution has been certified—Artists Space—and five more are expected to pass through the process by January. But even if institutions are hesitant to undergo the analysis, their staffs can use the fee calculator to determine fair payments. Likewise, artists may negotiate better with institutions, and W.A.G.E. encourages artists to cc them via email during this process. One thing left unresolved by certification and the fee calculator, however, is potential reimbursement of production expenses to an institution from an artist if a work is later sold. Standards for this type of agreement, it seems, would still be mediated individually and privately.

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    Lise Soskolne discusses the importance of line items for artists’ fee in organizational budgets

    Over the past few years I’ve noticed that people have trouble understanding and accepting W.A.G.E.’s specific goal—encouraging payments to artists by nonprofit institutions. During the Q&A, the audience raised other issues of inequity in the art world. What about unpaid interns and low-paid nonprofit employees? What about equal representation of woman in museum shows? What about resale royalties for artists? What about fair-labor practices in social practice art? (“It’s murky,” Soskolne answered, and pointed out that individual artists are not institutions.) What about donating a work to a nonprofit’s benefit auction? What about artists who teach? Can W.A.G.E. certify a festival?

    I’d like to see these questions addressed in thoughtful, beneficial ways. To achieve better equity in the art world, it’s clear we need to expand the cause beyond artist’s fees. Until those advocacy groups are formed, or existing groups are mobilized, artists and others must recognize the power in saying no to exploitative situations (among other solutions). “Discourse around labor is trendy in the art world,” Soskolne said, which is a good thing, and several upcoming events in New York this month—including “Parallel Fields: Alternative Economies” at A Blade of Grass on January 14, “The Artist as Debtor: A Conference about the Work of Artists in the Age of Speculative Capitalism” at Cooper Union on January 23, and “The Artists Financial Support Group Speaks Openly about Money and Debt” at the CUE Art Foundation on January 30—will keep the conversation going on a range of economic topics.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 In March 2014, Performa published a call for unpaid writing fellows for its online Performa Magazine. After conceding to pressure from the arts community, Performa agreed to pay honoraria to the fellows but later scrapped the program.

    Watch

  • The Punch in the Face That a Poster Can Have

    Curating Social Movements
    Tuesday, August 19, 2014
    ICI Curatorial Hub, Independent Curators International, New York

    An Occupy Wall Street poster from 2011 by the artist Lalo Alcaraz

    Weeks after the Occupy Movement started, in September 2011, museums began racing to collect the posters, flyers, and other materials from the protests. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History dispatched archivists from Washington, DC, and the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York sent representatives downtown, as reported by Artinfo, the Washington Times, and the New York Daily News. As an explanation, the Smithsonian released a statement on October 19 that read: “The Museum collects from contemporary events because many of these materials are ephemeral and if not collected immediately, are lost to the historical record.” In an editorial for CNN published in November, Michele Elam, a professor of English at Stanford University, wrote, “Occupy art might just be the movement’s most politically potent tool in its dramatic reframing of the racial dynamics of a populist uprising frequently characterized as largely white and ‘hippie.’” Academics, museums, and the media clearly recognized the importance of both Occupy and its visual culture in American history.

    Though squatting in Zuccotti Park ended permanently by mid-November 2011, activists and artists kept the movement alive in myriad other ways. So did the institutions. In summer 2012, the Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco contextualized contemporary materials with those from the region’s storied past of political dissent in Occupy Bay Area. In spring 2013, the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, organized Artists Take Action: Protest Posters Today, an exhibition of posters and ephemera from Occupy, some of which were borrowed from the Smithsonian. In that same year, the Museum of Modern Art added the Occuprint Portfolio, consisting of thirty-one screen prints (including work by Molly Crabapple, John Emerson, and Katherine Ball) from the Booklyn Artists Alliance, to its permanent collection.

    At the beginning of “Curating Social Movements,” the curator Ryan Wong claimed that the topic of curating social movements is underdiscussed. “Social-movement stuff,” he said, “falls through the cracks.” Wong rightly identified curators as political actors—negotiation among parties of various backgrounds and competing interests is implicit in the job. He also correctly proposed that examining the visual culture of social movements help us to better understand their history. But considering the kinds of activity mentioned above, Wong’s notion that “art institutions are threatened by this kind of work, these objects,” felt off the mark. Which institutions are threatened, and what exactly is the threat?

    A view of “Curating Social Movements” at the ICI Curatorial Hub

    Wong’s fellow panelist, the artist and activist Josh MacPhee, grew up as a punk-rock kid in Massachusetts, where he graduated from making flyers for bands to designing posters for housing struggles, bridging music and politics with cultural production. With Dara Greenwald, he organized Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now at Exit Art in 2008, an exhibition that served as a visual introduction to social movements around the world. (The show traveled to the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University a year later). MacPhee argued that the works of art, which were borrowed from eighty-two institutions, were integral to each movement’s political aspirations. Picking a bone with academia, he said that scholars tend to review what others have written (e.g., in journalistic accounts) and overlook the primary visual documents. I, too, find it odd that authors and historians could be so sloppy and wondered with scholars MacPhee had in mind.

    MacPhee represented Interference Archive, a collectively run group that acquires and houses materials and objects from social movements from the 1960s to the present, stages exhibitions of them, and makes them available for study. Based in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, the archive offers public programming, workshops, and events in a social space—just like many other libraries, museums, and cultural and educational centers. With a hands-on policy, he said, Interference Archive is not a quiet library.

    MacPhee offered seven ideas to distinguish cultural production, which I understood as useful materials for a particular purpose, from political art, a genre that operates in the world of so-called fine art. The first notion was autonomy. If I understand him correctly, the visual culture of social movements does not have autonomy—background information beyond a caption is needed for comprehending the full message of an image. To demonstrate, MacPhee showed a 1963 photograph by Charles Moore, depicting four American civil-rights activists sprayed by water hoses. The underlying significance to the image, not readily apparent, is not that these people are protestors, but that they’re protestors who are organized. I liked this point of view very much, but overall MacPhee’s logic regarding autonomy was unclear, since context is hugely critical for untangling the meaning of much contemporary art.

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    A Charles Moore photograph of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3, 1963

    The social forms of cultural production (MacPhee’s second idea) are important. He also emphasized the movement as producer (idea three), for which creative roles are flexible—teachers become television broadcasters. He also pointed out how arpilleras quilts were smuggled from Chile through the Catholic Church to raise funds for resistance efforts against a dictatorship. The stakes of visual material from social movements (idea four) are also vital: what are the intended goals apart from the individual concern? Prints depicting scenes from the Gwangju Uprising (by Hong Sung-dam and others) illustrated what was banned from television because, MacPhee said, journalists couldn’t work the right angle and the American government forced CBS not to broadcast footage. (Since I am not familiar with this history, I’ll take his word for it.) At this point MacPhee noted how Independent Curators International had recently been caught in crossfire with the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, a country that, he noted, pays three to four times the regular fee for visiting speakers.1

    Since upheaval generates cultural production, MacPhee identified cacophony as a fifth quality. In 1968 France, the Atelier Populaire generated thousands of revolutionary posters after protesters took over the equipment in the occupied École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He also mentioned a Nicaraguan artist “known for [his] Marlboro Man cowboy style,” whose images alluding to the wide-brimmed hat of the national hero Augusto César Sandino were adopted by the Sandinistas during the 1980s as a symbol of resistance. (Was Róger Pérez de la Rocha the name of this artist?)

    The White Bike Plan in Amsterdam was organized by a counterculture group called Provo

    Marginal ideas transform the world, which MacPhee called prefiguration (his sixth notion), referring to prefigurative politics, for which people imagine a better society before trying to realize it. The mid-1960s White Bike Plan in Amsterdam would have given free access to bicycles in the Dutch capital, he told us, but the CitiBike idea for New York was seized by sinister venture capitalists, just like portions of the code on which Twitter was built came from the open-sourced TXTMOB in 2004. It would be interesting to read a comparative analysis between the reception of the White Bike Plan and CitiBike—perhaps something has already been written?

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    Cataloger’s note from the Museum of Modern Art Library (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    MacPhee’s seventh and final idea argued that the art of social movements does not fit comfortably in museums and archives. Instead, he claimed, it often stays within the common—which probably means with private individuals who I imagine do not think of themselves as collectors or archivists. He showed a snapshot of a ten-year-old note referencing an unidentified collection of posters deemed “not cool enough” for initial cataloging by the Museum of Modern Art Library, which demonstrated a worker’s delightful sense of humor when prioritizing his or her work. Museums and institutions with different missions, though, happily collect social-movement ephemera, as I indicated in the opening paragraphs of this review. Nevertheless, I wonder if the creators of political posters aspire to have their work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—or to any institution that desires to preserve and present them—or if such fetishization is antithetical to revolution.

    Wong organized Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive in 2013–14, presenting the work of numerous activists in the 1970s. Early on, Wong noticed that the movement did not have a Wikipedia page, and only a handful of academic books deal with the subject. “Google searches turn up little,” he said. His exhibition focused on the Basement Workshop in Chinatown, which he said was a place to talk, hang out, and make posters. Photographs from the era are banal but offer the energy of the moment, Wong said, which sounded like a contradiction to my ears. But no matter—this was the “first time,” he said, “where Asian Americans are controlling their own image.”

    Ryan Wong talks about his exhibition Serve the People (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Serve the People incorporated diverse media: graphic works from the artist Tomie Arai; music from the folk record A Grain of Sand (1973) and by the jazz baritone saxophonist Fred Ho; copies of a newsletter called Getting Together; and posters for workshops, street fairs, and basic medical services; and more. The curator also included documentary photographs by Corky Lee of a Peter Yew protest against police brutality, during which twenty thousand people marched from Chinatown to City Hall. Wong said that didn’t know this kind of show was possible before [seeing] Signs of Change. When organizing Serve the People, Wong faced skeptics who asked him “Why now? Why you? What do you know about my history?” These are fair questions, but ones that a good curator will know how to answer.

    Conversation during the audience Q&A covered measuring success, intergenerational communication, and exhibitions at Interference Archive, such as reconciling participant’s recollections against material evidence and maintaining community after a show ends. Though the two speakers didn’t offer a satisfactory answer to that last point—Wong even said that exhibitions “do violence” to the memories of the movement—it seems as if a good presentation should sufficiently inspire or agitate people to organize on their own (while including the institution, if they so choose). An exhibition space shouldn’t be relied on to be the only group that can effect social change.

    Installation view of Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive

    Interference Archive is staffed by volunteers, which come to the group out of desire. The organization minimizes hierarchy, MacPhee said, though he suggested that board members should be movement activists. He also said that 95 percent of funding comes from visitors via memberships, passing the jar at events, and selling works, which makes organizational sustainability an issue, especially regarding digital issues in archival work.

    Digitization isn’t a solution to accessibility, MacPhee explained, noting the time, money, and labor that goes into the effort—not to mention the difficulties of conducting additional research, assessing impact, and giving materials proper frames of reference in the face of the internet’s decontextualizing force. It’s better to set up archives in other communities, he recommended, and Wong noted that cultural production for the Asian American Movement is spread across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Each city can build its own Interference Archive. Someone suggested forcing big museums to do this work, but anyone who has spent time in a nonprofit knows that even the most prominent institutions suffer from an overburdened workforce. There is hope: Interference Archive has a Born Digital Working Group assessing the situation of storing and facilitating the migration of electronic material for future accessibility. But alas, “There’s no funding stream for an archive,” MacPhee resigned.

    An audience member asked about discernment when collecting objects, especially with movements whose political beliefs (such as white power or the Tea Party) may not align with the left-oriented Interference Archive. MacPhee said his group collects material from all kinds of movements and has accumulated right-wing stuff from what he called “counterintelligence” collections, not from the movements themselves. He explained that right-wing activists have typically favored television talk shows over printed matter—remember all those skinheads on Donahue and Geraldo? MacPhee clarified that even people on the left espouse violence, homophobia, and a naïve understanding of revolution.

    “Are kids still doing this?” someone asked regarding cultural production for social movements. “Yes, all over the place,” MacPhee responded positively. That was good to hear.

    In Terms Of count: 6½.

    1 See Mostafa Heddaya, “Creative Time Reneges on Promise to BDS Artists with Israel Exhibition, Artist Withdraws,” Hyperallergic, June 5, 2014; and Anne Pasternak and Nato Thompson, “Creative Time Responds to BDS Arts Coalition Petition” Creative Time, June 13, 2014.

  • Writing for Socially Engaged Art

    Christopher Howard, founder and chief critic for In Terms Of, delivered the following untitled talk on a panel at the 2014 Open Engagement conference. The discussion, which was moderated by Chelsea Haines and included presentations by Sandra de la Loza and Juliana Driever, looked at new directions in writing about social practice from diverse perspectives.

    Writing for Socially Engaged Art
    Friday, May 16, 2014
    Open A.I.R. Workshops
    2014 Open Engagement
    Queens Museum, New York City Building, Queens Museum Theater, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York

    After being asked to participate on this panel, I wanted to know what kind of writing on socially engaged art is already out there. My conclusion is that there’s a lot of writing on socially engaged art out there. We have books devoted to the subject by Grant Kester, Claire Bishop, Pablo Helguera, Tom Finkelpearl, Nato Thompson, and Gregory Sholette, among others. We have essays by the above authors, as well as by Ben Davis, Steve Lambert, and Yates McKee. (Why so many men, I wonder?) They write on Project Row Houses, Theaster Gates, Suzanne Lacy, Tania Bruguera, Superflex, and the Yes Men, as well as projects sponsored by Creative Time, Art in Odd Places, and local and state arts councils across the country.

    Artists, writers, and curators discuss socially engaged art in Creative Time Reports and on several blogs hosted by the nonprofit organization A Blade of Grass. Over the past two months, the blog for Open Engagement has published daily responses to questions about social practice, and I’m sure we will read more about what happens at this three-day conference in the coming weeks, adding to the growing body of literature on socially engaged art.

    One could argue that participatory art probably generates more passionate debate than other form of art—although flipping through any art magazine or browsing any art blog would indicate otherwise. Traditional genres such as painting, sculpture, photography, and video still grab the lion’s share of attention, and reviews of socially engaged art rarely appear in the reviews section proper.

    Still, socially engaged art is totally mainstream. Last fall, for example, Artforum magazine, generally accepted as the pinnacle of art writing, published several major essays, including “Limits of Control,” Felicity Scott’s text on Rain Room at the Museum of Modern Art (2012) and other immersive environments, followed by several pieces on Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) and a reassessment of Andrea Fraser’s untitled sex video from 2003, which isn’t quite social practice as we generally understand it but which embodies many of the same issues confronting the field.1

    A view of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) at Forest Houses in Bronx, New York (photograph by the New York Observer)

    Last month ARTnews published major exposés on social practice, Carolina A. Miranda’s “How the Art of Social Practice Is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time,” and this month’s Art in America has a pair of essays on the genre: on the artist Pedro Reyes and three architectural firms that involve communities in their process. The academic journal October has published several of Bishop’s key essays and devoted its Fall 2012 issue to Occupy Wall Street. In the popular press, articles have been published in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and many other news websites that aren’t art-oriented.

    Considering all this activity, important questions arise: Are we content with the writing? Are we satisfied with the level of discourse? It depends on whom you ask. Many articles fret about documentation, about aesthetics, about experience, fussing over whether or not social practice is capital A art. Personally, I find such conversations to be uninteresting and unhelpful. My definition of art is elastic, expansive, and inclusive. Maybe I’m easy to please. But I fully recognize the need to keep having these conversations.

    In his 2013 essay, “The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism,” published in e-flux Journal, Grant Kester addressed the anxiety over writing on participatory art:

    The result has been a series of largely unproductive debates over the epistemological status of this work, most of which entails variations of the same simplistic opposition between a naïve social art practice, associated with the evils of humanism or pastoral sentimentality, and a theoretically rigorous, politically sophisticated avant-garde artistic practice.

    Often the conversation revolves around the ethical and political position of the artist, and how much the artist seizes or relinquishes power. I’ve found too much finger pointing and hair splitting in this strain of writing, which can be intensely puritanical.

    So how do writers sort out the good from the bad, or the worthwhile from the inconsequential? Where does a critic—or a viewer or a participant—draw the line and evaluate a project? “Does it work?” offers one person. “Is it useful?” states another. These are two possible directions, but there are many more. A writer can discuss socially engaged art—or any form of art—through many lenses: the history of art, contemporaneous art practices, literature, music, politics, the social sciences, economics, religion—through anything, really, and that’s what great about art, and what’s fun writing about art. The only prescriptions I would suggest for a writer is: research your subject thoroughly, try to say something new, and always question received wisdom.

    In the same e-flux Journal article, Kester encouraged writers to take a long view of social practice. He described a “field-based approach, in which the critic inhabits the site of practice for an extended period of time, paying special attention to the discursive, haptic, and social conditions of space, and the temporal rhythms of the processes that unfold there…. When does the work begin and when does it end?”

    This is a good approach that is typical of historians and certain kinds of journalists writing long-form articles, but not really the methods of critics, reporters, and bloggers, whose publications require fresh content daily. When writing about a work of socially engaged art, it’s important to talk to the artist, the participants, the passers-by, the institutional organizers, the funders—whoever might have been involved in or witnessed a project. Consult the published record. Consult as many sources as you can. Don’t just rely on your reactions.

    Participants in Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street (2013) in Brooklyn, New York (photograph by Nicola Goode)

    The history of art is far from static—it changes when new discoveries and connections are made. Moreover, a single review is a discrete piece of writing, never the final word, and one response at a given point in time. Would you get a sense of the 2014 Whitney Biennial if you just read one New York Times review and nothing else? Of course not. But read five, ten, twenty pieces—published over many months—and you’d get a good really sense of the reaction to the exhibition. The same goes for Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Stoop (2013) and Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, which generated many written responses in print and online. It would be fantastic if writers would return to Forest Houses in the South Bronx, where the monument was sited, and talk to people who had been there last summer. Or talk to the attendees who live elsewhere, or to Dia Art Foundation employees. I’m hopeful this will be done, and we’ll eventually get a better understanding of long-term implications of the work.

    I’ve been a practicing art critic in New York for ten years, reviewing exhibitions for print and online publications and also writing the occasional essay, but I haven’t written much on socially engaged art. Perhaps a parallel project is something that I’ve been engaged with for a few years.

    A self-published blog called In Terms Of publishes criticism of live speaking engagements such as lectures, panels, conversations, symposia, and the like, concentrating on events in New York City (but not exclusively). Public programs have existed for decades, yet the rapid increase of such events over the past ten years, as well as their standing in the art world, is astounding. An art exhibition today is inconceivable without an attendant calendar of events. Furthermore, live speaking engagements constitute a core part of the mission of libraries, bookstores, universities, and cultural centers. Since much contemporary art—not just social practice—depends on dialogue and conversation, the need for informed commentary on lectures and panels is tremendous but underdeveloped.

    In Terms Of has examined talks with a wide range of players: artists, art historians, curators, critics, and students, as well as scholars in the related disciplines of literature, philosophy, architecture, and design. One recent post examined the intersection of aesthetics and politics generated from a panel of artists and activists that was moderated by the author of a book called 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Another five-part series covered a one-day conference on curatorial authorship in art exhibitions, which featured historians, curators, and artists from around the United States. A third post explored the notion of critique in contemporary art through an analysis of a lecture by the installation artist Mika Tajima. Events outside the art world are also important: I’ve written about the contributors to an anthology of feminist comics, the author of a book that historicizes the Riot Grrrl movement, a former New York Times columnist on ethics, and the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, as well as the occasional forays into economics, politics, and law.

    I consider texts in In Terms Of to be experimental, not in the avant-garde sense but rather because I’m drawing from multiple genres: basic reporting, investigative journalism, art criticism, newspaper editorials, polemical prose, book reviews, art-historical research, and so on. Most of the time I follow the chronological presentation of the speaker or panelists, but not always, and that’s one thing with which I constantly struggle. After attending an event and taking scrupulous notes, I conduct research and interject my own responses into the written narrative. If the event was recorded and the video posted online, I’ll watch parts or all of it.

    I don’t approach live speaking engagements as art and would have a good laugh if you tried to convince me that a panel is a “performance of language.” I have no problem, though, stating that the overall goal for In Terms Of is to publish “socially engaged writing.”

    What kind of writing do social-practice artists want, if they want it at all? Do they need a fatter CV and bigger portfolio to establish professional credentials for job applications? Do they need publicity that will help them get a grant to fund the next project? How about clips to show mom and dad to justify the frivolous and expensive master’s degree? It still feels good to see your name in print, right? In a larger sense, are social-practice artists looking for a silver-bullet treatise, a text that defines and validates their work, something like Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” or Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”? You tell me.

    I would assume that any artist would want feedback on his or her work, something that acknowledges their effort and legitimizes their work. Not as approval—after all, an artist doesn’t work for his or her critics. But the work cannot exist by itself. It must be supported by an audience and by participants, through spoken and written words, through memories and feelings, with some level of intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic fulfillment. Will there be good writing about socially engaged art? Most emphatically yes. Will there be bad writing? Without a doubt. Will some writers miss the point? Sure, but others will get certainly get it.

    In Terms Of count: 0 (naturally).

    1 See the table of contents of the November 2013 issue of Artforum for links to the articles on Hirschhorn and Fraser.