AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE
LESSON 18
TUTOR: Chris Kraus
Page 170
Whereas modernism believed that the artist’s life held all the magic keys to reading works of art, neo-conceptualism has cooled this off and corporatized it. The artist’s own biography doesn’t matter much at all. What life? The blanker the better. The life experience of the artist, if channeled into the artwork, can only impede art’s neo-corporate, neo-Conceptual purpose. It is the biography of the institution that we want to read.
Reviewing dOCUMENTA (13) in New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz coins the term ‘Post Art’ to describe work that ‘doesn’t even see art as separate from living…things that aren’t artworks so much as they are about the drive to make things that, like ar, embed imagination in material and grasp that creativity is a cosmic force…A chemist or a general may be making Post Art every day at the office.”