The “Global” Contemporary Art Canon and the Case of China

ARTMargins ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-97
Author(s):  
Francesca Dal Lago
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Chinese Contemporary Art ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Academic Painting ◽  
Art Canon

This essay reviews the book Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents edited by Wu Hung and published by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010, as part of an ongoing series aiming to introduce art critical texts produced in non-mainstream art locales to an English-speaking audience. Gathering a large number of translated critical essays, the book outlines the production of Chinese Contemporary Art since what is normally accepted as its onset in the late 1970s. This essay argues that this process of definition, legitimized by the prominent publisher of this book, amounts to a form of canonization performed at the expenses of other contemporaneous artistic forms—ink and academic painting—whose culturally and historically specific nature de facto excludes them from a concept of art globalization still largely determined and rooted by Euro-American modernism.

scholarly journals Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 110-112
Author(s):  
Golnar Yarmohammad Touski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
Duke University

Book Review: Anneka Lenssen, Sarah A. Rogers, and Nada M. Shabout. Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, in association with Duke University Press, 2018. 464 pp.; 49 ills.; 51 b/w ills. Paperback, $40 (1633450384, 9781633450387)

scholarly journals Spanning the archive and the museum : Timothy O'Sullivan's King Survey photographs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily M Shutt
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Hot Springs ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Metropolitan Museum Of Art ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Art Canon ◽  
The Government ◽  
College Park ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Ansel Adams

Originally created as documents of the government surveys in the 1860s-1870s, Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs were rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century by museum curators, artists and scholars, many of whom argued for O'Sullivan's artistic genius, uniqueness and his proto-modernist compositions. His early champions were the artist Ansel Adams and curator Beaumont Newhall, but others argued for the aesthetic importance of his work at the end of the century, including scholars Joel Snyder, Robin Kelsey, and Museum of Modern Art curator Peter Galassi. In the early 1980s, Rosalind Krauss argued against the notion that O'Sullivan should be included in the photographic art canon in her 1982 article, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View" in Art Journal. This thesis focuses on the changing reception and the functions of O'Sullivan's photographs by an examination of different examples of one photograph, O'Sullivan's "Sioux Hot Springs", held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York), the National Archives Still Picture Unit (College Park, Maryland), and the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York).

Documenting the art of our time: a new research facility for The Museum of Modern Art, New York

2007 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-28
Author(s):  
Milan R. Hughston
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Research Facility ◽  
Museum Archives ◽  
New Space ◽  
New Research ◽  
Building Project ◽  
Research Resources

The Museum of Modern Art’s ten-year building project provided new, purpose-built spaces for the library and museum archives, one of the world’s premier research resources documenting modern and contemporary art. This article summarizes the planning and implementation of the new space and reflects on its successes after six months of operations.

scholarly journals Spanning the archive and the museum : Timothy O'Sullivan's King Survey photographs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily M Shutt
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Hot Springs ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Metropolitan Museum Of Art ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Art Canon ◽  
The Government ◽  
College Park ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Ansel Adams

Originally created as documents of the government surveys in the 1860s-1870s, Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs were rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century by museum curators, artists and scholars, many of whom argued for O'Sullivan's artistic genius, uniqueness and his proto-modernist compositions. His early champions were the artist Ansel Adams and curator Beaumont Newhall, but others argued for the aesthetic importance of his work at the end of the century, including scholars Joel Snyder, Robin Kelsey, and Museum of Modern Art curator Peter Galassi. In the early 1980s, Rosalind Krauss argued against the notion that O'Sullivan should be included in the photographic art canon in her 1982 article, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View" in Art Journal. This thesis focuses on the changing reception and the functions of O'Sullivan's photographs by an examination of different examples of one photograph, O'Sullivan's "Sioux Hot Springs", held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York), the National Archives Still Picture Unit (College Park, Maryland), and the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York).

scholarly journals Materials in the Field: Object-trajectories and Object-positions in the Field of Contemporary Art

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Dominguez Rubio ◽  
Elizabeth B. Silva
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Field Analysis ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Spatial Trajectory ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Object Trajectories

The paper explores the central role of artworks in the field of contemporary art. It is based on an ethnographic study of the conservation laboratory at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and draws from three detailed case studies where the temporal and spatial trajectory of artworks led to processes of competition, collaboration, and repositioning among the agents involved in the acquisition, exhibition and conservation of these artworks. The study demonstrates the importance of artworks qua physical objects in the field of contemporary art, claiming attention to materiality in field theory and engaging with an object-oriented methodology in field analysis. Artworks are shown to intervene in field processes, both reproducing divisions and re-drawing boundaries within and between fields, and actualizing positions of individuals and institutions.

The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players: The Origins of Professional Baseball and the American Identity

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
National Association ◽  
American Values ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
The 19Th Century

Baseball has been proudly coined “the national pastime” for nearly its entire existence. The sport evolved from several English bat and ball games and quickly became part of the American identity in the 19th century. Only a few decades after the first baseball club formed in New York City, amateur clubs began to organize into loose confederations as competition and glory entered a game originally associated with fraternal leisure. Soon after, clubs with enough fans and capital began to pay players for their services and by 1871 and league of solely professionals emerged. Known as The National Professional Base Ball Players Association, this league would only last five seasons but would lay the groundwork for the American tradition of professional sports that exists today. In this paper, I analyze the development of the sport of baseball into a professional industry alongside the concurrent industrialization and urbanization of the United States. I used primary documents from the era describing the growing popularity of the sport as well as modern historians’ accounts of early baseball. In addition, I rely on sources focusing on the changing American identity during this period known as The Gilded Age, which many attribute to be the beginnings of the modern understanding of American values. Ultimately, I conclude that baseball’s progression into a professional league from grassroots origins compared to a broader trend of the ideal American being viewed as urban, skilled, and affluent despite the majority not able to fit this characterization. How certain attributes become inherent to a group identity and the types of individuals able to communicate these messages are also explored. My analysis of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players provides insight on the formative experience of the modern collective American identity and baseball’s place in it as our national pastime.

Charles Olson and American Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Mark Rothko

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

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