Twenty years after the institution of the Decency Clause, a controversial funding requirement introduced by the National Endowment of the Arts in 1990, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions evaluating the stifling legacy of the Decency Clause and its impact on our culture.

Panel Discussion I
Survival vs. Autonomy: Public Funding of the Arts, Free Speech and Self Censorship

This panel examines how the introduction of the decency clause may have contributed to a growing distinction between conservative and avant-garde institutions. Rather than adhere to “common standards of decency,” a number of alternative organizations have sprung up that simply forfeit the potential of NEA funding. Have organizations modified their programming due to the decency clause? What alternative funding sources and strategies have they had to employ? How does the emergence of the commercial market relate to the issue of decency? The panelists come from both sides: founders of new alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government funding, and contemporary art projects that have been supported by the NEA.

Twenty years after the institution of the Decency Clause, a controversial funding requirement introduced by the National Endowment of the Arts in 1990, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions evaluating the stifling legacy of the Decency Clause and its impact on our culture.

Panel Discussion II
Decency, Respect and Community Standards: What Offends Us Now?

This panel looks at changing attitudes towards notions of decency over the past twenty years. It addresses how representations of nudity and sexuality have changed in contemporary art, and proposes a redefinition of what is considered offensive or inappropriate under our current political climate. The panel brings together artists whose work provoked the culture wars twenty years ago and those who deal with taboo topics today.

This panel discussion examines the viability of the conventionally printed and published book —monographic, serial, facsimile, high-value, low-budget, no-budget, and otherwise—as a means of artistic production in view of digital media. At a time of mass convergence, when much of the social experience is structured by virtual, electronic means, how might the physical and material residue of small-scale publications distinguish themselves from a space apart for resistance and subjectivity? Moderated by Gil Blank, the panel includes artists Roe Ethridge and Collier Schorr, alongside with James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff of Primary Information.

The Aperture Foundation, publisher of Aperture magazine, is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to the support and advancement of photography as a fine art. In collaboration with the Photography Program in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons Confounding Expectations XI is generously supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Henry Nias Foundation, the ASMP Fund, and the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. The lecture series has been hosted by The New School since 2001.

CALL: Roberta Smith, Criticism: A Life Sentence

On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.

RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility

Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.

During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”

Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?

By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”

As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?

At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.

Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.

I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.

Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?

Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”

Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?

An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.

Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present a talk by Pablo Helguera. Providing an “unauthorized biography” of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Helguera digs out little-known stories around the remarkable curators and other colorful figures of its past, while at the same time reflecting on the social role of individuals in museums and the way in which they influence the reading of objects and the larger narratives of collections.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. His work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction.

By Any Name (PDF) celebrates The New School’s 90th anniversary at a time when the university contends with a highly publicized period of internal criticism and activism. The voices assembled in this publication examine the school’s legacy of progressive pedagogy and institutional policy, and ask that it remain a catalyst for social transformation in the future.

The related exhibition and series of workshops and lectures, took place at The New School, October 19-24, 2009.

In collaboration with Performa09, the Vera List Center and Parsons The New School for Design present the American premiere of Museum Futures: Distributed, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska’s new film on the power of cultural institutions. Set in 2058, the film offers a provocative vision of a hyper-globalized art world featuring the future director of the future Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, which commissioned the piece on occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2008.

Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska have been collaborating since 1995. They have worked with museums, banks, galleries, archives, auction houses, schools, and department stores. They have investigated the smuggling of goods across the Polish-Ukrainian border, documented the lost property recovered in the London transport system in a single day, and impersonated a famous art dealer. Their different projects have consistently engaged with the relationship between art and institutions coupled with other domains such as politics, society and economics.

After the 30 minute-screening, the respondents Jamer Hunt and Christiane Paul offer an analysis of the film from their respective fields, in a joint conversation with Marysia Lewandowska.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in collaboration with Performa09 and Parsons’ Streaming Culture / Art & Politics series, and on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009-2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.”

As The New School considers its past, psychics Sherene Schostak and Kiki T consider its futures. Throughout the week, psychic services will be available to any member of the university community. In the space of free 15-minute consultations, short- and long-term predictions regarding grades, careers, change, etc. will be offered in the intimate, comfortable setting of Parts & Labor Gallery. Signup sheets available at all times; walk-ins welcome.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

In this re-visitation of John Cage’s 1961 sound work WHERE ARE WE GOING? AND WHAT ARE WE DOING?, sounds of The New School, sampled from recordings collected across campus, are re-configured through processes involving various methods of chance and randomization. Cage was first asked to respond to the questions in the title when he addressed art students at the evening school of Pratt Institute. He has also described the resulting piece as emerging from conversations with friends about the mutually influential relationship between art, science and nature.

Echoing the structural elements of Cage’s original piece, this response to the questions “where are we going and what are we doing? ” draws on site recordings made during sound walks through The New School. These recordings are superimposed on each other using chance procedures and amplified as a two-channel composition onto the street around The New School’s main building.  The live ambient sounds function as the performer does in Cage’s work. While drawing attention to ongoing shifts in time they also encourage attention to and reflection on the conditions that produce those shifts–conditions that may themselves, be shifted.

When no events are taking place in the gallery and Parts & Labor lies inactive and mute, these recordings will emanate  from the vicinity of the truck, evocative of the institution and the activities around it.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

The Vera List atrium and courtyard adjacent to the landmark Alvin Johnson Building harbor evidence of the history, memory, patronage and institutional identity of The New School–through an eclectic collection of significant art works. They range from Chaim Gross’ Acrobats Family of Five from 1951 and Gonzalo Fonseca’s ceramic tile mural from 1959-1961 to Martin Puryear’s seating arrangements (1997) and the 2008 addition to Dave Muller’s Interpolations and Extrapolations, a meditation on New School graphic identity.

In this conversation, Silvia Rocciolo, Curator of The New School Art Collection, and John Wanzel, Curatorial Assistant and MFA in Fine Arts candidate consider the role of The New School Art Collection as a living archive and how it reinforces institutional narrative and identity through its physical presence.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”