Awards

2009 Frank Jewett Mather Award

Boris Groys

The work of Boris Groys, professor of philosophy and art theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Global Professor at New York University, maintains and extends the tradition of art criticism as provocation. His essays in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) posit his arguments as stylish paradoxes that dismantle contemporary art and modernism, their presentation in public venues such as museums, and the role of curatorship and criticism within this framework. Groys consistently questions established and fashionable art-world notions but acknowledges and even honors the continued significance of utopian ideals in our construction of modernity.

For Groys, art practice and artistic discourse together constitute both an aesthetic realm and a sociological subject. He sees artwork and the activity surrounding it as constituting a vital and vibrant human dynamic. Skeptical but not cynical, analytical but not clinical, Groys regards the art world as a credible and even durable social phenomenon, and writes about it as much from the inside as from the outside. His writing on the art world serves to caution his fellow insiders while simultaneously enlightening its visitors from without. He reminds us, for instance, that artists and the art they produce are as keenly attuned to the world at large as they are to the art world, with the result that the art world itself is that much less a closed, narcissistic hall of mirrors.

Indeed, Groys’s regard for the art world is relatively sanguine. While he hardly condones imbalances in or abuses of power, he finds mechanisms of self-correction and transcendence at work throughout. He honors the art world’s ideological aspirations even as he brings forth its contradictions and failures, and with patience and admiration he considers contemporary art’s ability to struggle with intellectual and moral contradictions in art and life alike. Groys’s view of the art world, then, is as remarkable for its ultimate reasonability as it is for its unfailingly trenchant perception and eye for telling detail.

Jury: Peter Frank, Riverside Art Museum; Paul Krainak, Bradley University; and Alejandro Anreus, William Paterson University

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