New Media Critics Panel At The New Museum Tonight

I’m discussing how critics handle New Media tonight at the New Museum with Robert Ayers, Lauren Cornell, Ben Davis, Andrea Scott and Rachel Wolff. The panel follows the AICA annual meeting and will be moderated by Ben Davis. I promise to bring some opinions.

The talk starts at 7 and is open to the public. Seating is limited, so please RSVP: aicausaprogram@gmail.com. I challenge attendees to tweet from the New Museum auditorium, which is in their basement.

From the press release:

Our panel will examine how critics approach new media today. How do they define the subject, and how do more traditional critics, who write on “older media–which could include video and sound as well as painting and sculpture–deal with new, digital work, for example, and social media? Is it legitimate to talk about it and evaluate it without understanding all the techniques? By contrast, how do critics well versed in new media treat the subject. How much technical information should they give readers?  Or are the new media like any others–that is, wherever critics come from, at whatever time in history, they are entitled to understand work on its own terms in accord with their own experiences. Some of the panelists are most experienced in print; others are deeply immersed in the Internet.

Robert Ayers is a writer, artist, and curator, who has written extensively on painting, sculpture, performance, dance, music, technology, and the interdisciplinary arts for Art + Auction, Art Monthly, ARTnews, Performance Magazine, Studio International, Artscribe, and Modern Painters Artinfo, as well as Live Art Magazine, Transcript, Dance Theatre Journal, Performance Research among many other publications.

Ben Davis is an art critic living in New York. He is associate editor of Artnet Magazine. He has published widely on art and politics, including in Adbusters, Slate, and the Village Voice.

Andrea Scott is an art critic and editor at The New Yorker magazine, whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Parkett, and other publications. In the nineties, she produced projects by artists, including Lawrence Weiner, Doug Aitken, and Matthew Ritchie, for the online art platform adaweb.com, which is now in the collection of the Walker Art Center.

Paddy Johnson is the founding editor of Art Fag City. She has published in artreview.com, Art in America, FlashArt, Print Magazine, Time Out NY, The Reeler, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and The Guardian, among other venues, and she writes a regular column on art for The L Magazine. In 2008, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships and became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant.

Lauren Cornell is Executive Director of Rhizome and Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Rachel Wolff is a New York-based writer and editor who covers art for The Daily Beast and contributes to New York, ARTnews, and Manhattan, among many other publications.

Panel organized by Barbara MacAdam