Past Event

Bridie Lonie (lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Dunedin School of Art, PhD candidate at the Department of History and Art History, University of Otago) will initiate a conversation on different approaches to the place of institutions and to the uses of writing about art today and during the past decades.

What institutional frameworks do the arts need now?
What do artists need to know?
Is the idea of the canon still relevant?
What kinds of archives should we keep, and who should keep them?
Do we still want the savage critic’s protection from inadequate offerings?
What does artwriting as parallel play offer? 
Is art a privileged section of visual culture and if so does it need that privilege?
Theodor Adorno once suggested that there is an uneasy relationship between the idea of art as autonomous and its social function. Is that comment still relevant or productive?

Bridie Lonie has recently completed a doctoral thesis on art, climate change, interdisciplinarity and the Anthropocene and will graduate in December. She has written on feminist art, art and psychoanalytic theory, and has a BFA in painting from Auckland University