Arthur C. Danto

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  print November 2011

  Arthur C. Danto

  I HAVE BEEN STRUCK by how often those who have written about Cy Twombly expressed regret that they had never met him. Since I had the singular good fortune to have been Cy’s guest in Italy in 1996, two years after the tremendous retrospective organized by Kirk Varnedoe at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it occurred to me that there must be a general interest in knowing how he lived and what he was like. Cy was not an easy man to get to know, but once I made it past the barriers of his somewhat princely personality, he got to be a friend. I have never kept a diary and am at an age to forget

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  passages September 2010

  Arakawa

  THE ARTIST AND VISIONARY ARCHITECT Shusaku Arakawa, known by his surname alone, was in his mid-twenties when he left Japan, under some kind of cloud, in 1961. Legend has it that he arrived in New York with fourteen dollars and Marcel Duchamp’s phone number in his pocket. The following year he met Madeline Gins, a Barnard College graduate, in the art classes both were taking in Brooklyn, he to satisfy some visa condition, though he was already exhibiting his work. They became a couple almost immediately, and collaborators as well, soon embarking together upon their best-known artwork, The Mechanism

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  passages April 2010

  Thomas Hoving

  THOMAS HOVING’S DOUBLE LIFE, as art historian and arts administrator, was in both its dimensions driven by much the same set of obsessions—a passion for beauty in its most flamboyant artistic embodiments, and an insatiable lust for the publicity that went with celebrity. These qualities prompted a number of decisions that laid the groundwork of the museum as we know it today. And this was perhaps the true crowning achievement of his famous tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, from March 1967 until June 1977.

  The history of Hoving’s acquisitions for the institution,

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  film February 23, 2009

  Walk the Talk

  THE PRESS RELEASE for Astra Taylor’s documentary Examined Life (2009) describes it as a film that “pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets.” Most of the philosophers it features are beyond question among the brightest stars of the discipline, but the philosophy each professes belongs as much to the streets as to the classroom, which would not be true of what their colleagues for the most part teach—the technical canon of epistemology and logical analysis or the disciplines of metaphysics and philosophical psychology. The basis of their fame lies

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  books December 2008

  THE BEST BOOKS OF 2008

  15 SCHOLARS, CRITICS, WRITERS, AND ARTISTS CHOOSE THE YEAR’S OUTSTANDING TITLES.

  MICHAEL HARDT

  The financial crisis of fall 2008 is one symptom of a transition in the nature and form of global order. The most important question this transition raises is what new possibilities it is opening up; but before asking that, one has to understand also what the transition is closing down. Two of the best books I have read in the past year, Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (Verso) and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Picador),

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  print May 2008

  the student revolt at Columbia University

  I OFTEN THOUGHT, in the years that followed the great student uprising at Columbia in late April 1968, of the singular political inventiveness that shaped the event. It defined the form student uprisings were to take on campuses all across the country, almost as if a script had been pasted together in the heat of social action that was reenacted, year after year, as a kind of political drama, adaptable to local circumstance but essentially the same. The occupation of university buildings, the list of nonnegotiable demands, the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, the Radical Caucus, the armbands and

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  architecture April 2008

  Steven Holl

  UNTIL LAST MARCH, the main offices of New York University’s philosophy department looked out over Washington Square Park from the fifth floor of a building on the park’s east side. It is at once a tribute to the popularity of the discipline and to the excellence of NYU’s philosophers that the department had over the years outgrown this ideal location; philosophers were housed in three separate locations around the campus. This state of affairs was felt to be unsatisfactory, in part, surely, for administrative reasons, but mainly for reasons connected with the spirit of philosophical communities

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  books December 2007

  THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

  13 SCHOLARS, CRITICS, WRITERS, AND ARTISTS CHOOSE THE YEAR’S OUTSTANDING TITLES.

  BRIGID DOHERTY

  I turned to Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I (edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg; Stanford University Press) in connection with my attempts to look differently at what is made of thinking (and writing) in the art of Hanne Darboven, whose work has often been regarded (to my mind erroneously, or mostly erroneously) as an instance of “Conceptual art.” Psyche—which comprises translations of the first sixteen essays from a volume of Jacques Derrida’s writing that originally appeared

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  books February 2007

  T. J. Clark

  IN HIS PREFACE to Painting as an Art (1987), the philosopher Richard Wollheim described a somewhat unusual way of looking at paintings which he found both “massively time consuming and deeply rewarding”:

  I came to recognize that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I spent long hours in the church of San Salvatore in Venice, in the Louvre, in the Guggenheim

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  print December 2005

  the best books of the year

  Twelve scholars, critics, and artists choose the year's outstanding titles.

  YVE-ALAIN BOIS

  A book like Alastair Wright’s Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton University Press) is enough to rekindle my faith in the future of art history as a discipline. (Here I could also mention two other such rare pearls from 2005: Maria Gough’s The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution [University of California Press] and Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism [MIT Press]). The first amazing trait of Wright’s book is that it manages

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  print December 2005

  “Uncertain States of America”

  The aim of this exceedingly ambitious exhibition is to furnish some sense of what is the best American art currently produced by its youngest emerging artists. The director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Gunnar B. Kvaran, in collaboration with two widely esteemed European curators (and Artforum contributing editors)—Daniel Birnbaum and Hans-Ulrich Obrist—made several trips to visit studios in the United States, choosing pieces by artists who are little known abroad, though many are represented by enterprising galleries in New York and elsewhere. It would reveal, I imagine, more about

• previews September 2005

  Jörg Immendorff

  Jörg Immendorff, long considered Germany’s foremost political artist, has designed a playful architectural complex—a freestanding wall and six pavilions, connected by walkways, all painted stoplight red—for the upper gallery of Mies’s glass museum. The installation conceptually references Immendorff’s Lidl village of the late ’60s, a kind of Fluxus commune conceived when he was an anti-art art student of Joseph Beuys. But this new “red city,” with its emblematic detached wall, doubtless refers to the failed dream of an all-red unified Germany. Each