In light of the current controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, today we’re re-reading Anu Vikram’s essay about the last Whitney Biennial, in which Joe Scanlan’s use of the fictional Black persona “Donelle Woolford” initiated a heated debate about representation, race, inclusion, and oppression. Vikram notes, “Scanlan’s decision to cast Black women as agents for his personal edification and creative expression […] supercedes concern for[…..]

As part of our ten-year anniversary celebrations, we’re considering the best of a decade of arts criticism. Today’s selection comes from our executive director Michele Carlson, who writes, “I reread this essay the same day that San Francisco’s first fleet of self-driving Uber cars rolled out and one sailed straight through a red light in front of SFMOMA. This comes on the heels of the[…..]

Happy holidays! We’re wrapping up the year—and celebrating our tenth anniversary—by taking a look back at the best writing from the last decade. Today’s selection comes from operations manager Addy Rabinovich: “Anuradha Vikram carefully considers the potential problems of curating according to identity politics. Citing Adrian Piper’s controversial withdrawal from Radical Presence, Vikram questions whether the format of the ‘ethnicity exhibition’ truly serves those whose[…..]

Happy birthday, Daily Serving! This month marks our tenth year of bringing you some of the smartest art writing, and since this is such a momentous anniversary, we’re going to be celebrating for the next few months. To kick off the festivities, today we bring you an excerpt from our interview with Daily Serving’s founder, Seth Curcio. Back in 2006, Seth started this site from Charleston,[…..]

Today we’re thinking about what “school” means as a way of codifying an art movement—that is, the politics, aesthetics, and ethos that are implied by attributing work to a particular school. In that vein, we present Anuradha Vikram’s review of SFAI’s 2013 exhibition Energy That Is All Around—Mission School, wherein Vikram analyzes the problematics of the Mission School attribution. This article was originally published on November 18,[…..]

The first theme in our Summer Session series is labor, and today we’re revisiting Anuradha Vikram’s essay on the so-called creative economy and its effects: “The mythology of the creative economy explains much of why San Franciscans who have pioneered this approach to work are under-invested in the arts despite some apparent affinities. Why support artists with your hard-earned income when you are fully convinced you[…..]

#art #class #wealth #access #innovation #middleclass Writing for Artnet in January, Ben Davis’s “Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?” raised an important question about the relationship between privilege and access to a life in the arts. Examining the upbringings of a number of artists currently or recently on view at museums in New York, Davis drew the conclusion that if[…..]