Neglectful of this blog I have been. Returned from Europe months ago, I embarked on a round of conferences – in later October I did "Trans" the visual culture conference at University of Wisconsin-Madison, "Art in the Contested City" at Pratt Institute, and then "Continental Drift" at 16 Beaver both in early November in NYC. All these shindigs were illuminating, from very different points of view.
“Trans” on the face of it was very academic, celebrating the triumph of visual culture curricula and personnel in university departments around the country. As an art historian, I am not so sure it is such a great triumph. Visual culture plays into the hands of the corporatizing university, delivering more bang for the buck than traditional art history curricula. That is, it can be “art history lite,” while at the same time engaging students thematically with sexy-sounding courses. I am enough of a fogie to believe that it is important to study art as the technologies of control it has been – religious and political – for millennia of human history. As it stands, the students who will learn that are those who need to know it – i.e., the young elites who go to well-endowed private colleges and universities which continue to teach art history.
Visual culture strikes me as a transitional phase in academia. This is the mode of study that will integrate the liberated theoretical perspectives of race and gender, admit the racing transformations of our technologies, and attune us to a globalized world. Art history remains entrained to hardened conceptions of nationhood and bound to its devil’s bargain with museums (“yes, hard goods = history, and we will valorize that; your treasures shall be our stories”).
The Pratt Institute conference “Art in the Contested City” was one-day long, but sprawling and intense. It was accompanied by an exhibition of only a few days in which Jim Costanzo and Brynna Tucker brought together an intriguing group of activist and relational artists. (I wrote a piece for this show which is online there.) Held in the new Higgins Hall, the “Contested” conference was a heady mix of community art and social justice activists, community planners, cultural policy researchers, and artists. There is still a kind of bunkered-up separate world aspect to the community arts movement (CAN is its online organ)… It is not a New York thing – except in the outer boroughs where it thrives. I was thrilled to realize that the CA movement and the community development corporations that are allied with it comprises a ready-made grassroots counterweight to municipal and private development schemes inspired by the “creative class” model promoted by popular urbanist Richard Florida. Likewise, the academic cultural policy establishment in the U.S. is getting the rudiments of some kind of critical component in the empirical study of specific artists’ lives that is enabled by data projects like LINC. I realize that sounds hopelessly wonkish. But the problem basically is the same as with planning. It is done from the top down, without any real consultation with affected communities. (For a hometown example, Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards mega-development, a Bloomberg shenanigan, was showcased in this conference.) In order to develop any effective response to “cultural development” planning that is often basically subsidy to private real estate developers using artists as an excuse, there must be valid descriptions of artists’ communities so they can’t be casually misrepresented. So this is beginning to be possible…
All of this is a far cry from a genuinely critical cultural policy unit like the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policy (EIPCP) – but it’s a start. The Euros have been doing cultpol for 500 years
(Next – “Continental Drift.”)

Trans Visual Culture conference – to be a “permanent website” – www.visualculture.wisc.edu/Conference/Trans.html

exhibition at Pratt Institute “Art in the Contested City,” a project of Pratt Collaboratives – http://www.prattcollaboratives.org/conf-exhibit.php

LINC (the acronym for Leveraging Investments in Creativity, sigh)– http://www.lincnet.net/aboutLINC/index.html