Do We Live in Postartistic Times? Usology Roundtable Part 2
The program for Making Use: Life in Postartistic Times focused on the mutual interpenetration of art and other spheres of life, as well as seeking the “coefficient of art” far from museums and galleries. The last days of the exhibition were accompanied by intensive program, brought together under the term “Usology Roundtable”.
With the group of invited guests, we considered whether making use of artistic competence should be identified with socially useful art. We asked ourselves whether the effectiveness of art could be measured using ordinary criteria of politics, economics, or social work. Is making use of art tantamount to instrumentalizing it? How, if at all, to make use of a museum in the twenty-first century, in a world undergoing drastic reconfiguration before our eyes? And will cultural transformations and global political and economic turbulence tear down the conceptual edifices which the nineteenth-century model of a museum was built on and which the art world has remained faithful to for so long?
Participants in the session included Stephen Wright (writer, theoretician, and “shadow curator” of Making Use), Ivet Curlin (member of the Croatian curatorial collective WHW, responsible for the preparation of the Really Useful Knowledge show in 2014), Alistair Hudson (director of mima Middlesbrough, whose program is based on the Useful Museum concept), Marianne Zamecznik and Charlotte Bik Bandlien (founders of the Institutt for Bruk/Department of Usology at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts), and Making Use curators Sebastian Cichocki and Kuba Szreder.
