05 May 2015

Vera Jirousova Award: Call for Abstracts

Call for Abstracts
Art Criticism 2.0
A conference organized by the Research Center of the Academy of Visual Arts in Prague and Věra Jirousová Award
Prague, 6 November 2015

Confirmed keynote speaker: David Joselit (Graduate Center, CUNY)

It has become an established fact that the rise of the social media has had a decisive impact on the production and dissemination of art imagery. While there has been a lot of talk over the last five years of art 'after the internet', that is, of art existing in the cultural milieu that takes online access as a matter of course, the effects of this condition on art criticism have been just as dramatic, if perhaps less discussed. The privileged places of art-critical exposure – catalogue essay, curatorial remarks, broadsheet review, glossy art magazine article, academic research paper, art-historical monograph, and their online versions – have been challenged by new means of accessing the art-critical discourse ('joining the debate'): blog/tumblr entry, tweet, youtube video, facebook status/comment. Our conference wants to investigate the recent configuration of forces and voices within art criticism. The questions we seek to answer include:

Do recent developments in art production and dissemination call for new ways of writing about art?

What has been the effect of social media on the production and reception of art criticism? Have these changes transformed the task of the art critic? What is the future of art criticism with respect to these phenomena?

What happened to 'post-critical' criticism? And to the 'death of the critic'? Are we witnessing a return of 'judgemental' criticism?

How (if at all) has the art world power dynamic (artist – curator – dealer – critic) shifted over the last decade from the perspective of the art critic?

What are the boundaries of art criticism? Have the new means of information sharing given rise to new genres of art writing?

Who reads art criticism? What impact does writing about art have? How have ways of accessing art writing impacted art reception?

We invite critics, curators, artists, academics to submit their abstracts of 200 words to conference@cenavj.cz by 14 June 2015.

Selection Committee: Václav Magid (Charles University, Prague), Jakub Stejskal (Free University Berlin)

Notification of acceptance: 5 July 2015. The conference will be held in Prague, Czech Republic (venue to be determined), on 6 November 2015. Language of the conference: English. We anticipate publication of the papers both in English and in Czech translation. For future updates regarding venue, program, and travel information, please contact conference@cenavj.cz.