Talk

The MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to announce four special seminar sessions open to the public, the first in an ongoing series bringing world-renowned artists, curators and thinkers to a global audience for presentations and discussions. These events bring leading voices to all, with the chance to attend online, listen to the speakers’ presentations and then engage them directly in discussion during each 90-minute seminar. The topics focus on artists and exhibition-making, while also extending into more wide-ranging subjects—a unique opportunity for a worldwide exchange of ideas. For each session, a reading will be available in advance for all those who register.

On March 9 at 12:00pm EST, Terry Smith, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Theory at the European Graduate School, will present Iconomic Wars.

In a famous essay, Walter Benjamin remarked that art’s history might be seen as a “working out” of an internal tension between “the artwork’s cult value and its exhibition value.” In 1935, film was the art form triggering this tension. Today, the question of value is all the more potent in every way, culturally, economically, politically, spiritually. In our multi-mediated image economy and with tensions of all kinds in society rising exponentially, the question of the iconomy is crucial. What does this mean for artists, curators, and all of us in making sense of the world and what is to be done?