Next Saturday, March 19, Triple Canopy and Fillip will be cohosting Secondary Information: The Persistence and Absence of Criticism, a conversation at Queen's Nails Projects in San Francisco, 3191 Mission Street, beginning at 2 p.m. A small group of Bay Area writers and editors will discuss, with editors of Fillip (Vancouver, BC) and Triple Canopy (New York, Los Angeles), the numerous vehicles for, and approaches to, art criticism today, considering their value and significance vis-a-vis a spectrum of temporal and spatial contexts and engagements. How has the decentralization of publishing and the fragmentation of readerships affected art criticism? How are critical public spaces constituted around various forms of publication, whether online or in print? How might alternative forms of publication work to establish a critical position in relation to cultural production without necessarily engaging in conventional criticism? What is, and what should be, the role of criticism in relation to the speculative global art market and its preternatural ability to absorb, or cannibalize, oppositional discourses?
This discussion, which also marks the launch of Fillip 13, will take as points of departure Fillip and Artspeak's Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism book and forum (2009) and related texts as well as Print and Demand, Triple Canopy's ongoing series of conversations about how print culture is being changed by the manifold forms of online publication. Participants include Bruno Fazzolari (Art Practical), Tara McDowell (The Exhibitionist), Julian Myers (California College of the Arts), Kristina Lee Podesva (Fillip), and Alexander Provan (Triple Canopy).
Penelope Umbrico, Desk Trajectories (As Is), 2010.