James Elkins: The State of Art Criticism

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Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (Andrew Hemingway, ed.)

“This anthology is conceived as an introduction to recent thinking about the past of Marxist art history. It is not offered in the spirit of nostalgia – a kind of dusting off of relics – but as a prompt to critique and renewal. My assumption is that much of the history the contributors tell is little known in its specifics, and that its achievements are often misconstrued and undervalued.” (from the introduction)

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Mensahe sa PAKSA Hinggil sa Tungkulin ng mga Kadre sa Larangan ng Kultura (Jose Maria Sison)

“Angkop na angkop ang pagkakapili sa paksa ng kongreso, “Panitikan Mula sa Masa Tungo sa Masa.” Ipinapakita nito ang namumukod na katangian ng PAKSA bilang progresibo at makabayang organisasyon ng mga manunulat, kritiko, guro’t estudyante ng panitikan na buo ang kapasyahang maglingkod sa sambayanan.” -JM Sison

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The Cultural Turn (Fredric Jameson)

“In a brief compass, The Cultural Turn traces the movement of one of the leading cultural intelligences of our time, in pursuit of the mutable forms of the postmodern world. The results will leave few indifferent.” (from Perry Anderson’s foreword)

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Ways of Seeing (John Berger)

“In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images every day of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently. In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.

One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation. The publicity image belongs to the moment. We see it as we turn a page, as we turn a corner, as a vehicle passes us. Or we see it on a television screen while waiting for the commercial break to end. Publicity images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.” (quoted from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing)

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Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art (Alain Badiou)

“I think everybody has the 15 theses, it is necessary, I think, for the talk. I’ll comment about the theses and you can read them. I think the great question about contemporary art is how not to be Romantic. It’s the great question and a very difficult one. More precisely, the question is how not to be a formalist-Romantic. Something like a mixture between Romanticism and formalism. On one side is the absolute desire for new forms, always new forms, something like an infinite desire. Modernity is the infinite desire of new forms. But, on the other side, is obsession with the body, with finitude, sex, cruelty, death. The contradiction of the tension between the obsession of new forms and the obsession of finitude, body, cruelty, suffering and death is something like a synthesis between formalism and Romanticism and it is the dominant current in contemporary art. All the 15 theses have as a sort of goal, the question how not to be formalist-Romantic. That is, in my opinion, the question of contemporary art.” (excerpt)

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