Welcome to this month’s Pick ‘N Mix, a selection of interesting tidbits about curators that I spotted on the web over the past few weeks.

- A great interview with Mary Jane Jacob is available over at the always interesting Bad at Sports podcast/bl…

On the note of modernism,
I recently read Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which of course is not about art, but I am curious to relate the ideas about modernism in that book to what we think about modernism in art.

Anyone familiar with his work?

One complaint. AS Mary Jane pointed out by correcting your Modernism / PoMo “dividing line” — Please get your history right.

Modernism neither peaked at nor did it end with Ab Ex. (It was, among other things, the beginning of US modernism).

Thereafter IN and as a PART of Modernism came Color Field / Post-Painterly, Pop Art, Op Art, Hard Edge /Formalism, Kinetic Art, Fluxus/Neo-Dada, Conceptual Art, Performance/Body Art, Photo-Realism, Earth Art/arte povera. In a certain way, it can be seen as all peaking and wrapping up with CONCEPTUALISM as the ultimate result of reductivism.

THEN PoMo starts. It is being argued out among of historian-types exactly with WHAT PoMo began, — my theory is with Feminist art — but it was clear WHEN — believe me, I was there, in grad school at the time.

I know what readings you are probably indirectly referencing, but you are misinterpretaing, I suspect. The people finding sources for PoMo in Pop and so on are searching for the seeds or philosophical ROOTS of the latter event, NOT the beginning. That is a different theoretical task; it is a common phenomenon, or even technique, of “stretching back in history for insinuations,” so to speak, AFTER the fact of a new entity’s appearance and looking far BEFORE its actual inception. E.g., most historians trace the roots of modernism to the Renaissance — it is the birth of a “modern world” in a very real way — but no one thinks Modernism started there. (I know you are well read, thus that is my supposition — I’d hate to think that instead of that you are referring to that 80s attempt to place AbEx as some imaginary peak … that claim was simply that old straw-man-opponent propaganda of Neo-Conceptualists, who also ignorantly and anachronistically mixed or confused AbEx and Neo-Ex — Neo-Ex being a PoMo attempted rebirth of German Expressionism, not of AbEx —; this is now a clearly dead issue, one which no historian or anyone outside a small, tainted coterie every listened to anyway.)