Contribution to MoMA conference: Contemporary Art Forum: Art Speech—A Symposium on Symposia

This two-day program at MoMA brings together artists, art historians, scholars, critics, writers, and speech and performance studies experts to discuss possible frameworks for better understanding issues surrounding art speech and methods for being direct and achieving clarity in spoken public presentations in the visual arts. The spoken public presentation is central in the field of the visual arts, particularly in the area of adult learning. Public program departments in museums operate based on a set of conventions regarding the way they present lectures or discussions about art involving artists, art historians, and/or theorists. Yet very little qualitative analysis has been conducted on the effectiveness of these presentations. Often times, public presentations are deemed impenetrable or obscure. What is communicated in writing cannot always be easily grasped when presented on stage.

Using a variety of strategies, this year’s forum will seek to anatomize art historians' and artists' habits at the podium. Sessions will include reenactments of famous acts of criticism, critiques of the academic slide show, an investigation of the effects of apparently authoritative presentations, experiments in the effects of stage presence, and analyses of the academic introduction and of the performative.

Presenters and respondents on May 20 include Carey Young, artist; Monika Szewczyk, Head of Publications at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Claus Noppeney, Professor, Bern University of the Arts, Bern, Switzerland , Ellen Levy, artist and Associate Professor, Pratt Institute, New York; Jonathan Gilmore, Assistant Professor, department of Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven; Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University; Benjamin Binstock, Associate Professor, Art History and Theory, Cooper Union, New York; James Elkin, E.C. Chadbourne Chair, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Pablo Helguera, Director, Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
This symposium takes place over two days, May 20 and 21 2011.