Following a conversation in January this year with critics Max Glauner, Helen Lagger and Samuel Schellenberg, in March Aoife Rosenmeyer returned to the subject of practicing contemporary criticism with Mitchell Anderson, Brit Barton, Adam Jasper and Julia Moritz. While these four are active elsewhere as artists, curators, academics and in art mediation, their critical writing is to be found in specialist international art publications on and off-line. This is the discussion that ensued.
In January 2021, while all of Switzerland was shielded from the danger of exposure to exhibitions, Aoife Rosenmeyer spoke to critics and journalists Max Glauner, Helen Lagger and Samuel Schellenberg. All three have significant experience covering art – and other cultural forms – for broadsheet newspapers. The subject of the discussion was the contemporary perspective on art criticism: Is it a viable practice? Who needs it? And what informs it?
The Engadin village of Susch has a new museum. No, Grażyna Kulczyk has a new museum. Or do female artists have a new museum? Or Polish artists? The Muzeum Susch was launched to ring out 2018; by the 2nd of January 2019 it was open to the public. To what public? The Muzeum Susch poses a dilemma for would-be critics as it draws the issues of private museums into sharp focus, while at the same time demonstrating the freedoms such institutions enjoy.
Three city-center public art projects took place in Basel and Zürich this summer, each notionally offering public gathering places. A comparison of the three reveals that dividing public and private interests is difficult, while the public itself remains an indistinct collective. This is a context in which riffing on that vagueness might be an effective strategy.
Walking into Laure Prouvost’s exhibition I nearly missed a note she had dropped. She had written it for the moment I moved through the liminal glass passage where you can see galleries in front and behind, yet below lies the water of Lake Lucerne. It read «…look iam waving but maybe you cant see me I can see you, you look great today…» in sloping cursive, though nobody down there seemed to be looking up.
