Now is the time #5: New Canon

Lectures by Robert S. Nelson & Ruth Noack

11 Dec 2008

The new millennium seems to demand concise canons that present a clear selection of highlights from our national cultural history with which everyone can identify. At the same time numerous new, or at least ‘alternative’ art historical surveys are presented in publications and exhibitions that give a voice to artists and artistic expressions previously ignored by the Western mainstream. These apparently contradictory tendencies seem to be pushing the arts in opposite directions. While we focus on the significance of art in terms of issues of national representation and identity (art to bind a divided society), we also judge art by its transnational character and the way it reflects the complexities of a globalised society. What exactly do these revisions of the Western canon imply? What criteria and structural principles are at work in the new canons? How does the ‘canonical principle’ operate in symbolic spaces such as the documenta and other international blockbuster exhibitions or curated group shows?

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Now is the Time! -

With:
Robert S. Nelson, Ruth Noack, Margriet Schavemaker

Speakers

Robert S. Nelson (US/UK) is Professor of Art History at Yale University. He specialises in the Art of Byzantium and the theory and methods of art history. Nelson is co-editor of Critical Terms for Art History (1996-2003) and author of Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (2003), as well as the eminent essay, The Map of Art History (1997).
Ruth Noack (AUT) is an art historian and co-curator of documenta 12. Noack’s publications include: Shirin Neshat (2000), Double Life: Identity and Transformation in Contemporary Art (2002), Danica Dakic: Role-taking, Role-making (2006) and documenta 12 Catalogue & Reader (2007).

Moderator

Deborah Cherry (UK) is Chair of the Modern Art Department at the University of Amsterdam and editor of Art History magazine.


Now is the Time: Art and Theory in the 21st Century is a series of seven lecture evenings dedicated to seven themes that encircle the complex arena in which the arts of the new millennium are situated. Socially engaged themes like 9/11, globalisation and the turn to religion of our contemporary society are juxta­posed with subjects that are more directly related to art, such as the return of Romanticism, the primacy of design and the status of the artwork in what is referred to as ‘the postmedium condition’.

Now is the Time is a collaboration between:
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,
University of Amsterdam, W139,
SMBA and METROPOLIS M

Location:
Oude Lutherse Kerk, Auditorium of the University of Amsterdam
Singel 411 (Corner Spui)
1012 WN Amsterdam

Lecture Hours:
8 p.m. – 10.30 p.m.
doors open at 7.30 p.m.

Go to the Now is the Time website for reservations