In some ways the final section on comparative writing formats—and perhaps the book as whole—could just as plausibly been titled How to Read About Contemporary Art: what do these different authors say, and how? For the fledgling art-writer, alongside looking at acres of contemporary art, nothing beats reading all you can, and analyzing closely how your favorite writers—of whatever stripe—get their ideas across. Is it the writer’s brilliant intuition about art, or their heart-stopping vocabulary, or the erudition behind their words? Remember to read not just for content (what are they saying?) but for style (how are they saying it?). Do not plagiarize, but feel free to steal other writers’ winning techniques and inspiring vocabulary. You want your writing to speak meaningfully to others interested in art. If your text confuses rather than illuminates, scrap it and start again. If your writing regularly appeals to art-haters, that is nothing to brag about. Trust your experience of the work, and the thoughts it provoked in you. Reinforce your thinking by acquiring real knowledge about art—always the shortest route to alleviating art-writing fears.
If a catalogue essay alienates you from an exhibition you’d enjoyed before reading it, or a museum wall-text transforms the interesting artwork on view into something odious, such writing must be deemed unsuccessful. The art-writer’s job must be to enhance, not obfuscate or destroy, the pleasure of art. Good art writers never sound as if they are struggling to cook up something to say, or miming words spoken before (by someone else), or clinging to jargon to weigh their words with gravitas. Intimidating the reader is never their goal. Good art-writing knows that art is meaningful; therefore meaning does not have to be forced upon it, only discovered, enjoyed, and put into plain words.
INTRODUCTION
1 John Ruskin, Modern Painters IV, vol. 3 (1856), in The Genius of John Ruskin: Selection from His Writings, ed. John D. Rosenberg (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 91.
2 Alix Rule and David Levine, ‘International Art English’, Triple Canopy 16 (17 May–30 Jul 2012); http://canopycanopycanopy.com/16/international_art_english.
3 Andy Beckett, ‘A User’s Guide to Artspeak’, Guardian, 17 Jan 2013; http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english/. Mostafa Heddaya, ‘When Artspeak Masks Oppression’, Hyperallergic, 6 Mar 2013; http://hyperallergic.com/66348/when-artspeak-masks-oppression/. Hito Steyerl, ‘International Disco Latin’, e-flux journal 45 (May 2013); http://www.e-flux.com/journal/international-disco-latin/. Martha Rosler, ‘English and All That’, e-flux journal 45 (May 2013); http://www.e-flux.com/journal/english-and-all-that/.
4 Cf., ‘Editorial: Mind your language’, Burlington 1320, vol. 155 (Mar 2013): 151; Richard Dorment, ‘Walk through British Art, Tate Britain, review’, Daily Telegraph, 13 May 2013, which responded to Tate Britain’s new label-free hang with relief at being spared ‘garrulous picture labels [that] made the heart sink’; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/10053531/Walk-Through-British-Art-Tate-Britain-review.html.
5 Julian Stallabrass, ‘Rhetoric of the Image: on Contemporary Curating’, Artforum 7, vol. 51 (Mar 2013): 71.
6 Cf., MA in Critical Writing in Art & Design, Royal College of Art, London; MFA in Art Writing, Goldsmiths College, University of London; MFA in Art Criticism & Writing, School of Visual Arts, New York; MA in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies, Columbia University, New York.
7 Cf., Dennis Cooper, Closer (1989); Tom McCarthy, Remainder (2001); Lynne Tillman, American Genius, A Comedy (2006); Saul Anton, Warhol’s Dream (2007); Katrina Palmer, The Dark Object (2010). Don De Lillo’s novel Point Omega (2010) is bracketed by the author’s blow-by-blow account of what we recognize as Douglas Gordon’s video-installation, 24-Hour Psycho (1993).
SECTION ONE The Job
8 Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art’ (2011), from a lecture given at the School of Visual Arts in New York, 18 Nov 2010, frieze 137 (March 2011); http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/of-ourselves-and-of-our-origins-subjects-of-art/.
9 Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’ (1964), Against Interpretation (Toronto: Doubleday, 1990), 14.
10 Peter Schjeldhal, interviewed by Mary Flynn, Blackbird 1, vol. 3 (Spring 2004); http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n1/gallery/schjeldahl_p/interview_text.htm.
11 Barry Schwabsky, ‘Criticism and Self-Criticism’, The Brooklyn Rail (Dec 2012–Jan 2013); http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/12/artseen/criticism-and-self-criticism/.
12 Arthur C. Danto, ‘From Philosophy to Art Criticism’, American Art 1, vol. 16 (Spring 2002): 14.
13 E.g., this is suggested by Lane Relyea, ‘All Over and At Once’ (2003), in Raphael Rubinstein, ed., Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of the Practice (Lennox, MA: Hard Press, 2006), 51.
14 Boris Groys, ‘Critical Reflections’, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 111.
15 Possibly the earliest art-writings that we know of were found in a Babylonian proto-museum built around the 6th-century BCE. These were stone-tablet ‘labels’ which accompanied artefacts older than the labels by some 16 centuries, and which explained the ancient objects’ forgotten origins. Geoffrey D. Lewis, ‘Collections, Collectors and Museums: A Brief World Survey’, Manual of Curatorship: A Guide to Museum Practice, ed. John M.A. Thompson (London: Butterworth/The Museums Association, 1984), 7.
16 Andrew Hunt, ‘Minor Curating?’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice 2, vol. 9 (Dec 2010): 154.
17 40% of surveyed American newspaper critics claim to make art themselves. András Szántó, ed., The Visual Art Critic: A Survey of Art Critics at General-Interest News Publications in America (New York: Columbia University, 2002), 14; http://www.najp.org/publications/researchreports/tvac.pdf.
18 Schjeldahl, ‘Of Ourselves’, op. cit.
19 Roberta Smith, cited in Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (London: Granta, 2008), 172.
20 Cf. Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 135. Ben Lewis, ‘So Who Put the Con in Contemporary Art?’, Evening Standard, 16 Nov 2007; reply from Jennifer Higgie, ‘Con Man’, frieze blog, 3 Dec 2007; http://blog.frieze.com/con_man/.
21 Martha Rosler, ‘English and All That’, op. cit.
22 Dave Hickey, cited in Daniel A. Siedell, ‘Academic Art Criticism’, in Elkins and Newman, eds., The State of Art Criticism (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 245.
23 Eleanor Heartney, ‘What Are Critics For?’, American Art 1, vol. 16 (Spring 2002): 7.
24 Lane Relyea, ‘After Criticism’, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, eds. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 360.
25 http://www.cifo.org/blog/?p=1161&option=com_wordpress&Itemid=24.
26 John Kelsey, ‘The Hack’, in Birmbaum and Graw, eds., Canvases and Careers Today: Criticism and its Markets (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 73.
27 Ibid, 70.
28 Frances Stark, ‘Pull Quotable’, in Collected Writings 1993–2003 (London: Book Works, 2003), 68–69.
29 http://60wrdmin.org/home.html.
30 Cf., James Elkins, ‘Art Criticism’, unpublished entry for the Grove (Oxford) Dictionary of Art; http://www.jameselkins.com/images/stories/jamese/pdfs/art-criticism-grove.pdf. Thomas Crow, Painters in Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 6.
31 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1846’ (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1846).
32 See Crow, Painters in Public Life, 1–3.
33 Szántó, The Visual Art Critic, 9; James Elkins, ‘What Happened to Art Criticism?’ in Rubinstein, ed., Critical Mess, op. cit., 8.
34 Discussed by Kelsey, ‘The Hack’, in Birnbaum and Graw, eds., Canvases and Careers Today, op. cit., 69; and Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973).
35 Anna Lovatt, ‘Rosalind Krauss: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths, 1985’, in The Books that Shaped Art History, Richard Shone and John Paul Stonard, eds. (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 195.
36 E.g., ‘Editorial: Mind your language’, op. cit.
37 Cf., Rule and Levine, ‘International Art English’, op. cit.; Beckett, ‘A User’s Guide to Artspeak’, op. cit.
38 A noted example of counter-interpretations regards Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg’s opposing views on a movement they both admired, Abstract Expressionism. See James Panero, ‘The Critical Moment: Abstract Expressionism’s Dueling Dio’, in Humanities 4, vol. 29 (Jul–Aug 2008); http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/julyaugust/feature/the-critical-moment.
39 Stuart Morgan, What the Butler Saw: Selected Writings, ed. Ian Hunt (London: Durian, 1996), 14.
40 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in Intentions and Other Writings (New York: Doubleday, 1891) responding to Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, The National Review (1864), cited in Boris Groys in conversation with Brian Dillon, ‘Who do You Think You’re Talking To?’, frieze 121 (Mar 2009); https://www.frieze.com/issue/article/who_do_you_think_youre_talking_to/.
41 Denis Diderot, ‘Salon de 1765’, in Denis Diderot: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin, 1994), 236–39. For a counter-interpretation, see Emma Barker, ‘Reading the Greuze Girl: the daughter’s seduction’, Representations 117 (2012): 86–119.
42 http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/information/.
43 Paul de Man, cited in Michael Shreyach, ‘The Recovery of Criticism’, in Elkins and Newman, eds., The State of Art Criticism, op. cit., 4.
44 This quote has been attributed to many, including comedians Martin Mull and Steve Martin; musicians Laurie Anderson, Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa, and others, but may have existed, with some variation, since the early 20th century; http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/.
45 I.e., applying the suggestion of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whereby ‘language only exists as an attempt to fix that which antagonism subverts’. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards Radical Democratic Practice (London: Verso, 1985), 125.
46 See John Yau, ‘The Poet as Art Critic’, The American Poetry Review 3, vol. 34 (May–Jun 2005): 45–50.
47 Dan Fox, ‘Altercritics’, frieze blog, Feb 2009; http://blog.frieze.com/altercritics/.
48 Jan Verwoert, ‘Talk to the Thing’, in Elkins and Newman, eds., The State of Art Criticism, op. cit., 343.
49 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (1926). This quote is from a footnote in the section titled ‘The Passage de l’Opera’.
50 Groys, ‘Critical Reflections’, 117.
51 See Orit Gat, ‘Art Criticism in the Age of Yelp’, Rhizome, 12 Nov 2013, on Yelp critic Brian Droitcour, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/nov/12/art-criticism-age-yelp/.
SECTION TWO The Practice
52 Maria Fusco, Michael Newman, Adrian Rifkin, and Yve Lomax, ‘11 Statements around art-writing’, frieze blog, 10 October 2011; http://blog.frieze.com/11-statements-around-art-writing/.
53 Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner; London: Hodder, 2000), 127.
54 Office of Policy and Analysis, ‘An Analysis of Visitor Comment Books from Six Exhibitions at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery’ (Dec 2007); http://www.si.edu/content/opanda/docs/Rpts2007/07.12.SacklerComments.Final.pdf.
55 This final iteration, attributed to Alphonse Daudet, appears in Frederick Hartt’s textbook Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall; New York: Harry Abrams; London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), 317. Other attributions in somewhat modified versions include the art-critic and poet Théophile Gautier (Goya in Perspective, ed. Fred Licht, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973, 162) and the painter Pierre Auguste Renoir (Edward J. Olszewski, ‘Exorcising Goya’s “The Family of Charles IV”’, Artibus et Historiae vol. 20, no. 40 (1999): 169–85 (182–83)). Another popular textbook, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, 6th edn. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), claims that an unnamed ‘later critic’ described the royal portrait as the ‘grocer and his family who have just won the lottery prize’ (1975, 663). Solvay is identified as the first to pen the basic idea in Alisa Luxenberg, ‘Further Light on the Critical Reception of Goya’s Family of Charles IV as Caricature’, Artibus et Historiae 46, vol. 23 (2002): 179–82.
56 William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th edn. (New York: Longman, 1999), 23.
57 This politicized interpretation has been contested: Goya may have been less of a revolutionary and caricaturist than Solvay and others assumed. See Luxenberg, ‘Further Light …’, op. cit.
58 Peter Plagens, ‘At a Crossroads’, in Rubinstein, ed., Critical Mess, op. cit., 117.
59 http://artsheffield.org/artsheffield2010/as/41, accessed Mar 2013. For other accounts of this artist’s work, see Clara Kim, ‘Vulnerability for an exploration’, Art in Asia (May–Jun 2009): 44–45; Joanna Fiduccia, ‘New skin for the old ceremony’, Kaleidoscope 10 (Spring 2011): 120–24; Daniel Birnbaum, ‘First take: on Haegue Yang’, Artforum, vol. 41, no. 5 (Jan 2003): 123.
60 Tania Bruguera, ‘The Museum Revisited’, Artforum, vol. 48, no. 10 (Summer 2010): 299.
61 Jon Thompson, ‘Why I Trust Images More than Words’, The Collected Writings of Jon Thompson, Jeremy Akerman and Eileen Daly, eds. (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 21.
62 Amanda Renshaw and Gilda Williams Ruggi, The Art Book for Children (London and New York: Phaidon, 2005), 65.
63 Sam Bardaouil, ‘The Clash of the Icons in the Transmodern Age’, ZOOM Contemporary Art Fair, New York 2010; http://www.zoomartfair.com/Sam’s%20Essay.pdf.
64 The ‘Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest’ ran from 1995 to 1998. http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm.
65 ‘Elad Lassry at Francesca Pia’, Contemporary Art Daily, 16 May 2011; http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2011/05/elad-lassry-at-francesca-pia/. For a critic’s text on Lassry, see Douglas Crimp, ‘Being Framed: on Elad Lassry at The Kitchen’, Artforum vol. 51, no. 5 (Jan 2013): 55–56.
66 Gordon Matta-Clark, quoted in James Attlee, ‘Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier’, Tate Papers—Tate’s Online Research Journal; http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7297.
67 Schjeldahl, ‘Of Ourselves’, op. cit.
68 King, On Writing, op. cit., 125.
69 Disclaimer: David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), my guru for all things writing, sometimes threw caution to the wind, stringing together three adverbs or adverbial phrases, plus he split his infinitives to shreds: ‘Performers…seem to mysteriously just suddenly appear’ or ‘He…is hard not to sort of almost actually like’. ‘Big Red Son’ (1998), in Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (London: Abacus, 2005), 38; 44. If you have even a fraction of Wallace’s talent, you can get away with almost anything. If not, ‘kill excess adverbs’ remains sound advice.
70 See George Kubler, ‘The Limitations of Biography’, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
71 E.g., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, Grove Art Online, and art glossaries published on the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate websites, among others. For new media, when I need to explain bitmaps and pixels (which stands for ‘Picture Element’), I’ve bookmarked http://www.mediacollege.com/glossary.
72 Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’, Artforum vol. 6, no. 4 (Dec 1967); David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000); Calvin Tomkins has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1960, where he writes the Profiles column.
73 A.W.N. Pugin, Contrasts: or a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; shewing the Present Decay of Taste (London, 1836).
Section THREE The Ropes
74 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (chap. 2) (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 1890; London: Ward Lock & Co, 1891).
75 E.g. http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/plagiarism/.
76 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998), trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Matheiu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002).
77 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
78 Jon Ippolito, ‘Death by Wall Label’; http://www.three.org/ippolito/.
79 Thomson and Craighead, ‘Decorative Newsfeeds’; www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/decnews/html.
80 Ippolito, ‘Death by Wall Label’, op. cit.
81 John H. Falk and Lynn Dierking, The Museum Experience (Washington, D.C.: Whalesback Books, 1992), 71.
82 ‘Editorial: mind your language’, op. cit.
83 ‘For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 12)’; http://www.davidzwirner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-CW-Press-Release.pdf.
84 I’m not 100% certain this was a press release, except that it sat next to the visitor’s book exactly where the press release stack would be, and no other printed material was available. http://moussemagazine.it/michael-dean-herald-street/.
85 ‘Clickety Click’; http://moussemagazine.it/marie-lund-clickety/.
86 ‘Episode 1: Germinal’; http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2013/05/loretta-fahrenholz-at-halle-fur-kunst-luneburg/#more-83137. Again, I am presuming this was a press release.
87 ‘The Venal Muse’; http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2012/12/charles-mayton-at-balice-hertling/.
88 ‘Hides on All Sides’; http://www.benenson.ae/viewtopic.php?t=20046&p=45050.
89 Tom Morton, ‘Second Thoughts: Mum and Dad Show’; http://www.bard.edu/ccs/wp-content/uploads/RH9.Morton.pdf.
90 Cf., Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010); Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings for Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)—just two such publications in the 15-page bibliography rounding off Horowitz’s research-packed Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
91 Horowitz, Art of the Deal, op. cit., 21.
92 Ibid, 21.
93 Spelled ‘affinies’ in the original.
94 Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction, London, 12 October 2012, 152.
95 Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), Christie’s New York, 16 May 2007.
96 Nico Israel, ‘Neo Rauch, David Zwirner’, Artforum 1, vol. 44 (Sep 2005): 301–2.
97 Jerry Saltz, ‘Reason without Meaning’, The Village Voice, 8–14 June 2005, 74.
98 See frieze editors, ‘Periodical Tables (Part 2)’, frieze 100 (Jun–Aug 2006); http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/periodical_tables_part_2/. For an up-to-the-minute hot list of art-blogs, see Edward Winkleman, ‘Websites You Should Know’, http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/.
99 Roberta Smith is the author of all three stories for the New York Times: ‘Franz West is Dead at 65: Creator of an Art Universe’, 26 July 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/arts/design/franz-west-influential-sculptor-dies-at-65.html?_r=0; ‘Google Art Project Expands’, 3 April 2012, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/google-art-project-expands/; ‘Critic’s Notebook: Lessons in Looking’, 6 March 2012, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/critics-notebook-lessons-in-looking/.
100 Smith was promoted to co-chief art-critic at the New York Times in 2011. Not to be confused with Bob and Roberta Smith, as UK artist Patrick Brill calls himself.
101 Schjeldahl, ‘Of Ourselves’, op. cit.
102 Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (London: Granta, 2008), op. cit.
103 Ben Lewis, ‘Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton’, The Sunday Times, 5 October 2008, http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/article239937.ece.
104 E.g., the penultimate lines to Will Brand’s uncompromising review of Damien Hirst’s ‘The Complete Spot Paintings’ at Gagosian Gallery, New York (Jan–Mar 2012): ‘[W]e hate this shit. Everyone hates this shit.’ Will Brand, ‘Hirsts Spotted at Gagosian’, Art Fag City, 4 January 2012; http://artfcity.com/2012/01/04/hirsts-spotted-at-gagosian/. See also Orit Gat, ‘Art Criticism in the Age of Yelp’, Rhizome, 12 November 2013, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/nov/12/art-criticism-age-yelp/.
105 ‘What follows is my year-long journey of discovery through the workings of the contemporary art market…’, Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (London: Aurum; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 7.
106 Hickey’s ascendancy is not without its critics; see Amelia Jones, ‘“Every Man Knows Where and How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure”: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics’, in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, Emory Elliot, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne, eds. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 215–40.
107 In 2012 Hickey announced he was quitting the ‘nasty…stupid’ art-world. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/28/art-critic-dave-hickey-quits-art-world.
108 https://www.uoguelph.ca/sofam/shenkman-lecture-contemporary-art-presents-dave-hickey. Collected volumes of Hickey’s writings include The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993; revised edn., Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997).
109 http://www.schulich.yorku.ca/SSB-Extra/connect2009.nsf/docs/Biography+-+Don+Thompson.
110 Marcel Proust’s novel Swann’s Way (1913) includes the famous early scene in which the narrator takes a bite from a tea-soaked madeleine cake and this triggers an unexpected wave of emotion and memories, opening up the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time.
111 If ‘thirty pieces of silver’ sounds familiar, that’s because this was the sum Judas Iscariot was paid to betray Jesus, Matthew 26:14–16.
112 Bruce Hainley, Tom Friedman (London and New York: Phaidon, 2001), 44–85.
113 To explore these, have a look at specialist venues such as printedmatter.org, the London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery, and numerous small art book fairs in many cities.
114 Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Lawrence Weiner. The resulting A4-format Xerox Book was then photocopied and printed.
115 ‘Young adult readers prefer printed to ebooks’, Guardian, 25 November 2013; http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/25/young-adult-readers-prefer-printed-ebooks.
116 Curated by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer, and Andreas Siekmann, Haus der Kulturen Welt, Berlin, 8 October 2010–2 January 2011. A ‘straight’ exhibition guide, discussing the artists on view, was available online.
117 Seth Price, ‘Dispersion’, the ‘well-circulated, illustrated manifesto on art, media, reproduction, and distribution systems’ (http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=10202), was first published for the 2001–2 Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art, and has also been published as an artist’s book. See http://www.distributedhistory.com/Disperzone.html.
118 Curated by Anthony Hubermann, designed by Will Holder. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; ICA London; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Culturgest, Lisbon.
119 Bruce Nauman, cited in Hubermann et al., For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2009), 94.
120 Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; Head of Publications, Bettina Funcke.Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz, 2012.
121 http://www.artybollocks.com/#.
122 Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996; 2nd edn., revised and expanded by Kristine Stiles, 2012).
123 Bruce Nauman, text from the 1967 window or wall sign, illuminated in neon and set in a swirl pattern. See http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/31965.html.
124 Broodthaers: ‘Me too, I asked myself if I could not sell something and succeed in life. It’s been awhile that I’ve been good for nothing…’. Invitation card for first gallery exhibition, Galerie Saint-Laurent, Paris, 1964. See Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers: 1964–1976 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1.
125 Cf., ‘[T]he abstraction pulls on the viewer like a vortex’, BlouinArtinfo, http://www.blouinartinfo.com/artists/sarah-morris-128620 (cited from Wikipedia); ‘Her paintings have become increasingly disorientating over time, with their internal vortex-like spaces working to pull the picture beyond the reality of the canvas’, http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/sarah_morris_los_angeles_hoxton_square_2004/, a line repeated with minimal modification around the web.
126 Adrian Searle, ‘Dazzled by the Rings’, Guardian, 29 July 2008; http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/jul/30/art.olympicgames2008.
