Talk

BFA Visual & Critical Studies and the Honors Program present art historian Alex Kitnick to discuss what “normal art” is and if it is something we want to make.

We are living in an age when the normal seems suddenly up for grabs. In the art world we are typically told to scorn all that is normal (right?), but in the wider culture today we hear more and more about “new normals” in contexts ranging from politics to the weather. This talk will look at some of the ways in which the idea of the normal has been treated in contemporary art both in terms of subject matter and stylistic conventions, and it will wonder out loud if there’s not something we want to salvage there after all.

Alex Kitnick is assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and a frequent contributor to publications including Artforum, Art Journal and October. He edited issue 136 of October on New Brutalism and a collection of John McHale’s writings, The Expendable Reader: Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media, 1951–1979. His book Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde was published by University of Chicago Press in 2021. He is the recipient of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and Whiting, Hyde and Helena Rubinstein fellowships.