Dinner with Donald

Tonight I'm going to Donald Kuspit's keynote lecture at the SFAI Art Writing Conference. I'm really looking forward to it, as it seems that lately he's been trying to draw connections between digital art and "older" forms. A good example would be his recent essay, "The Matrix of Sensations," on ArtNet. He talked quite a bit about the transition(s) from impressionist and modernist painting to new media, vis a vis the isolation of data points. For what it's worth, I just want to say (to someone, somewhere...) that a year (or so) ago, I proposed a conference talk about impressionist painting as a precursor to (or, rather, itself a form of) information art and the proposal was turned down... But then I'm not a contributing editor to Artforum... I'm just a blogger prone to ellipses....... :) Anyway, the other conference speakers (myself, Kenneth Baker, Susan Landauer, Mark Levy, John Rapko, and conference organizer Mark Van Proyen) will all be going out to dinner with Kuspit, afterwards. Should be fun!

Update: The talk was interesting. Kuspit's quite the entertainer, but he makes no bones about being fairly opposed to feminism. First he mentioned that he and the Guerilla Girls received honorary PhDs from SFAI at the same time, and called himself a Guerilla Boy. But then he talked about how Hans Breder's not getting his due credit for "conceiving of and making" Ana Mendieta's work, and then he asked "whatever happened to Diego Rivera?," which elicited some hissing... But he spent most of his time talking about how art history is killing contemporary art. In other words, he pretty much just read this article. Dinner was more interesting, in part because I sat next to Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man. Kuspit's very interested in Burning Man, partly because so many other people are interested in it.