Chris Kraus: Lost Properties: Some Arguments For and Against the Dematerialization of Art (2014)

“Everyone wants to be an artist. The number of undergraduate students completing fine arts degrees at US colleges doubled in the years between 1985–2010, according to the Digest of Education Statistics. But being an artist doesn’t necessarily mean making drawings or paintings or sculpture or even installations or videos. The desire to pursue a life in ‘fine art’ simply means a desire to respond creatively to the present, just as the disciplines of ‘poetry’ or ‘rock & roll’ were ciphers for countercultural lifestyles in other eras. The only real difference lies in credentialing. As the definition of what constitutes ‘fine art’ expands to include journalism, social work, landscape architecture, theater, poetry, school-teaching, and literary nonfiction under the banners of ‘social practice,’ ‘research,’ and ‘art writing,’ institutions respond by offering specialized, low-residency degrees in these areas taught by itinerant, poorly-paid faculty. Participants travel between cities within and beyond Europe to dialogue about ‘communities’ during brief residencies.”

Publisher Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2014
Number 19 in a series of 22 publications produced on the occasion of the 2014 Whitney Biennial
ISBN 9781584351573
31 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (no OCR, 4 MB)