Series:

Sternberg Press / Institut für Kunstkritik

3 total works

Cover of Three Cases of Value Reflection
Examinations of Francis Ponge's texts on Jean Fautrier's “Hostage Paintings,” Jack Whitten's Memorial Paintings, and Banksy's auction stunt Love is in the Bin.

This book contains three case studies on very different artists, analyzing their work through their respective historical contexts: the writer Francis Ponge (1899–1988) and his seminal text on Jean Fautrier's “Hostage Paintings” from 1943; visual artist Jack Whitten's (1939–2018) Memorial Paintings and Banksy's notorious auction stunt Love is in the Bin from 2018.

Examining all three artistic propositions from a value-theoretical point of view, Graw finds Ponge's text on Fautrier to be “doubly materialist” insofar as it (seemingly) reveals its own material conditions while simultaneously grasping the specific materiality of Fautrier's paintings; suggests that the indications of value in Whitten's painting to be more indirect; and reveals Banksy's value reflections to have a very different generational thrust.

Gaw shows that Ponge's text is full of value-reflexive insights but that Ponge himself is an ambivalent figure. She finds that the dedication of Whitten's paintings inscribes them in a system of exchange. And, finally, the deliberate aesthetic meagerness of Banksy's Love Is in the Bin points to an emptiness at the heart of value.

Institut für Kunstkritik series

Cover of Canvases and Careers Today – Criticism and Its Markets
Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market.

“It was especially interesting for us to watch a kind of transatlantic divide happening. While the US-American participants mostly declared criticism as obsolete while hoping for turning its weakness into a strength, most European participants departed from the opposite diagnosis: that criticism has never been as strong as it is today, since it is now part of a knowledge-based economy.”—Isabelle Graw/Daniel Birnbaum

Contributors
George Baker, Johanna Burton, Merlin Carpenter, Melanie Gilligan, Isabelle Graw, Tom Holert, Branden W. Joseph, John Kelsey, André Rottmann, Julia Voss

Institut für Kunstkritik Series

Cover of Painting beyond Itself – The Medium in the Post–Medium Condition
In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard University in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity. Myriad conceptions of the medium and its specificity are explored by an international group of scholars, critics, and artists. Painting beyond Itself is a forum for rich historical, theoretical, and practice-grounded conversation.

Contributors
Carol Armstrong, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, René Démoris, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Jutta Koether, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Matt Saunders, Amy Sillman

Institut für Kunstkritik Series