The round table "Criticism of new institutionalism" of the Laboratory of Art Criticism will be held on March 15 from 15:00 to 18:00 in the Vintage Hall of the CCA Winzavod.
The Laboratory of Art Criticism (together with the BAZA Institute) is presenting a round table on the tendency of modern cultural institutions to reform themselves from within. The discussion will be attended by representatives of major Moscow cultural centers, among them: CCA Winzavod, Museum "Garage", V-A-C Foundation, Cultural Center ZIL and others.
In his reflections on institutional critique, British critic and theorist Simon Sheikh deduces such a negative-dialectic figure characterizing the current state of the art process as institutional critique of oneself from within.
"Such an institutional critique, 'eaten' by its own object, is like a bacterium, which for a short time weakened the patient's organism - institutions - but in the end only hardened its immune system. This seemingly contradiction makes us talk about new institutionalism.
By criticizing themselves, institutions create comfortable spaces for the promotion of artists understood as representatives of various social groups, develop non-artistic contexts for the presentation of art, including networks, encourage multidisciplinary practices on their sites, popularize art criticism and art theory, fitting them into an "educational turn", develop a cultural economy of impressions, creative clusters, incubators for the development of creative initiatives, etc.
These institutional reforms aim at harmonizing social contradictions, at least at the cultural level, and create conditions for more equitable access to the art process.
While welcoming this trend as positive, art criticism cannot ignore the contradictions it creates to describe and develop the art process. On this basis, the Artistic Criticism Laboratory proposes to make the new institutionalism a subject for discussion for members of the creative community engaged in reforms from within, for artists who are directly involved in these reforms, for representatives of public categories who are beginning to get involved in the new institutional structure and, of course, for critics who have the task of highlighting and promoting new institutional projects.
A round table on new institutionality is proposed for discussion:
- What drives the new institutionalism: a social demand or some artistic intention that responds to new phenomena in theory and art? And how do they fit together?
- How do artists assess the opportunities for projects to be implemented under the new institutionalism?
- Does the new institutionalism need support from critics and what are their expectations of critical thought?
Thus, the theme of the round table is not so much politics and the behavior of institutions, but rather the specificity of the contemporary artistic subject, who obviously encounters the "needle ear" of the new institutional spaces (in the words of the same Sheikh) and the formation of its institutional identity.
The project Laboratory of Art Criticism (together with the BAZA Institute) is part of the Winzavod.Obrazovanie direction. The Laboratory's activity is aimed at supporting and developing the school of aesthetic thought in the information space.
Enter is free, link to registration: https://winzavodart.timepad.ru/event/1278159/
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