Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism
Conference
27 February 2009
A two-day international conference held at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. Participants included: Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Jeff Derksen, Diedrich Diederichsen, Maria Fusco, Markus Miessen, Tom Morton, John O’Brian, Kristina Lee Podesva, Jordan Strom, William Wood and Tirdad Zolghadr.
Jeff Derksen, myself and Diedrich Diederichsen
Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism - organised by Fillip magazine and Artspeak - sought to confront what is at stake in the shifting value of judgment within contemporary art writing today.
My panel debated preconceptions about literary, poetic, and genre-blurring forms of art criticism which are often seen as part of a reaction against or escape from judgment. But, is this necessarily the case? Can they co-exist? Must judgment, as Christopher Bedford suggests, be predicated on “explicitly stated, clearly enumerated criteria”? Can judgment operate within more experimental modes of art criticism? We questionned whether lapses in judgment generate productive spaces. What is the role of value and quality assessment in modes of writing that resist becoming entwined with the contemporary art market?
Read more about the book which accompanies this conference