WHAT DO WE WANT FROM ART – AND WHAT DOES ART WANT FROM US?
– Joshua Decter
July, 8
“Art and our Contradictions: Financialization, Protest, Metapolitics, Fragmentation”
We will think about how art is at once entangled within – and embodies – certain broader social and cultural contradictions, even as art (and its various institutional and economic systems) seeks to address societal injustices, inequities, and environmental crisis. If we consider art to be an instrument that claims to offer solutions to various social and political problems, can art accomplish this without generating or reproducing other inequities? There has been a longstanding desire for art to operate in the realm of Realpolitik, for it to function not merely as soft power, but also as hard power, and yet art tends to be suspended in a sort of meta-political or para-political amber. If anything, it may be art as a form of capital (in hyper-financialized times) where a ‘political dimension’ may appear, paradoxically.
September, 30
“Some Limits of Reason: Can art be transgressive?”
This is the title of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Julião Sarmento that took place at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York in 2005. The show explored various notions of transgression, in relation to Foucault’s reflections on Bataille’s concept of transgression. Here we can consider Sarmento’s synthesizing of these philosophical concepts in his art as a jumping off point to speculate if and how art can be transgressive in our current (and future) circumstances, and to think about what transgression means in the 21st Century… particularly since ‘god’ died long ago (Foucault speaks of the death of god in relation to Bataille).
October, 14
“The Social Media History of Art (The Work of Art in the Age of Social Mediation)”
How to imagine a revisionist contemporary art history in relation to how art has been recontextualized – and decontextualized – on social media? I will propose that it is possible, if not necessary, to develop a revisionist contemporary art history that investigates how art has been transformed within the circuits of social media. One aspect of this argument will be based on a history of art in the digital realm from the 1990s onwards that serves as a technological and cognitive precursor to art’s presence on social media. Can social media be considered a medium? And does AI mean that anyone can potentially be an artist? Or is it that AI will become the artist, and human beings merely the material/medium for AI?
Duration: 45 minutes + 15 min Q&A
Time: 6 pm (all sessions)
Please note that attending the talks requires a valid admission ticket. For ticket information please visit the Pavilhão Julião Sarmento website.
Pavilhão Julião Sarmento: Av. da Índia 172, 1400-207 Lisbon