Awards
2010 Frank Jewett Mather Award
Terry Smith
Terry Smith (photograph by John Williams)
Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualize art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves. While elaborating on, even admiring, the intricacies of contemporary art and the conditions under which it is produced and consumed, Smith is able to clarify with an almost disarming lucidity the role and place of art making and art viewing, in our time.
The title of Smith’s book, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pretends to a flat-footed, docentlike matter-of-factness; but the series of interrelated essays that constitute the book unpacks a vast range of topics and issues, a range only an engaged and passionate, but still discerning and even skeptical, professional could manage. Smith’s fellow professionals likely find most of these topics and issues engaging and urgent without his prompting, but he speaks for us in the breadth of his purview, the depth of his investigations, and the balanced but still fervent acuity of his opinions. His considerations—thorough, witty, and refreshingly light on jargon—make the subjects of his attention seem less muddled and more reasonable, if in many cases no less absurd. His is a measured voice, analytical yet nuanced and even poetic, free of both cynicism and rage and more penetrating for that in its criticisms of folly. Smith is that rare critic more interested in art than in his own ability to talk about it, and yet he talks about it artfully. In this regard, What Is Contemporary Art? recommends itself as much to the casual viewer of today’s art and art world as it does to the makers of that art and that world.
What Is Contemporary Art? takes the reader on a theoretical tour through some of the world’s most influential art museums, laying bare their conflicted missions and studying the heightening distinction, and dispute, between modern and contemporary art. Smith also examines the pretenses of specific artists who epitomize high-stakes modernism or, conversely, claim ownership to the idea of the contemporary. But he is never as cogent as when he interrogates the extended venues of contemporary art, from earthworks to art fairs, carefully maintaining the global overview he has cultivated as an Australian currently based in the United States. With What Is Contemporary Art? Smith cements his reputation as a commentator able to articulate temporality as a layered multidirectional process, applying ideas of contemporaneity to image economies, practicing artists, and historical art languages and forcefully describing a “global art subculture” trapped in state of ontological unrest.
Jury: Alejandro Anreus, William Paterson University; Peter Frank, THE Magazine; and Paul Krainak, Bradley University.
