Art Historian Discusses State of the Critique
Lesley University series features Helmut Draxler
For artists, the terms “critical” and “critique” have come to embody a growing number of social, cultural, and historic factors and influences. Tonight, as part of its Visiting Artist Lectures, the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University will feature a consideration of critique by Berlin-based Austrian art historian Helmut Draxler: Art Talk: On Critique — Art Historian Helmut Draxler.
Sponsored by Lesley’s MFA program in visual arts, the lecture will probe an art world that according to Lesley’s description “seems increasingly to be shaped by critical demands, institutional expectations, and individual ambitions,” both locally and globally. Draxler will address the question of whether the resulting confusion indicates a “coming fury of further conflicts and social changes in the way art practices are to be understood.”
A professor of art theory at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart, Draxler organized the 2004-2006 project Avant-garde Film Biopolitics at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. More recently he curated the exhibition Shandyism. Authorship as Genre, at the Secession, Vienna. He has written on contemporary art and theory for many international magazines.
Free and open to the public, the lecture is from 7 to 9 p.m. at BU’s Kenmore Classroom Building, KCB Auditorium, 565 Commonwealth Ave., Kenmore Square. For more information, call 617-585-6770.
Susan Seligson can be reached at sueselig@bu.edu.
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