Exercises in timeliness
Lecture by prof. Terry Smith

What are the main concerns of artists today? What are the major currents within contemporary art practice?

Which patterns occur on global scales, and how do these interconnect with local placemaking? How has art practice changed the nature of contemporary curating? Traditional, modern, and contemporary curatorial modes coexist awkwardly, both inside and outside artworlds. How are curators responding to the challenges of curating within contemporary difference yet with a view to planetary connectivity?

Since 2000, US-based, Australian art historian Terry Smith has argued that artists, architects, curators and art theorists have been responding to the nature of contemporary reality in terms of its definitive quality, its differential contemporaneity. He will discuss the key ideas underlying his widely read and often controversial books, including "What is Contemporary Art?" (University of Chicago Press, 2009), "Contemporary Art: World Currents" (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011), "Thinking Contemporary Curating" (Independent Curators International, New York, 2012), and "Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity" (in Slovenian, Ales Erjavec ed., Ljubljana: Slovenian Society of Aesthetics, 2013).