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This week: SoPra fest continues, the usual cast of characters talks to Stephen Wright about what is and isn’t art.

Stephen Wright is an art writer, independent researcher and curator and professor of art history and theory at the École européenne supérieure de l’image (Angouleme / Poitiers). Former research fellow in the “Art and Globalisation” programme at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris) and programme director at the Collège international de Philosophie (Paris), he is a founding user of the Usual College of the Academy of Decreative Arts. He has organised conferences at Tate Modern (London), Columbia University (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), INHA (Paris), Musée d’art contemporain (Montreal), Aksanat (Istanbul), Videobrasil (Sao Paulo)… Member of the International Art Critics Association, former European Editor of the Montreal-based contemporary art journal Parachute (1997-2005), and editorial board member of the London-based journal Third Text, he has written widely on emergent art and art-related practice as forms of knowledge production in a context of globalisation.

As a curator, he has produced a series of exhibitions and publications dealing with art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, including The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade (New York, 2004), Dataesthetics (Zagreb, 2007), Rumour as Media (Istanbul, 2006), Palestinian Products (Cairo, 2005), Recomposing Desire (Beirut, 2008) and Diggers All! (Montreal, forthcoming 2010).

Laureat t of the European Art Essay competition (2008), he is currently working on the book-length essay Arbitrating Attention, and is putting together a collection of essays, Specific Visibility. A selection of his writings are available on the blog n.e.w.s. to which he is an active contributor,http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/56

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This week: Duncan, Richard and guest co-host Dr. Amy Mooney, Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia College, talk with superstar artist Kehinde Wiley about his work and his exhibition “The World Stage: India-Sri Lanka” which just opened at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery (through October 23, 2010).

The following seemingly outdated bio was lifted from the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles in 1977. He received his BFA in 1999 from the San Francisco Art Institute and graduated from Yale University School of Art two years later. Wiley is viewed as the modern-day heir to a long line of portraitists –Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Tiepolo– from whom he appropriates the symbols and visual language of heroism, power, and opulence in his realistic renderings of urban black men. While referencing specific old master paintings and fusing period elements– French Rococo ornamentation, Islamic architecture, West African textile design– into his portraits, the final works convey a very urban, contemporary aesthetic because of the subjects portrayed and their hip-hop influenced attire. Wiley succeeds in his intent to blur the boundaries between traditional and present-day modes of representation, as he says to “quote historical sources and position young black men within that field of power.”

Mark Staff Brandl has released a full length video version complete with illustration of his speach presented at the CAA (College Art Association, art historians organization) annual conference in Chicago this past week as well as at the Kunstschule Lichtenstein, in 2010. It concerns description and criticism of the standard conceptions and models of fine art history and the history of comics, while offering a new one model for conceiving of and teaching these histories.

Also Mark Staff Brandl gave a video interview with Columbia College while in town that is fun as well.

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This week we return to Chicago’s magic love and check in with a few local heroes, Rob Davis and Michael Langlois. Fresh from shows in New York and Berlin, they have returned home to a run of great exhibitions starting with the Cultural Center in January and rolling up to the current 12 x 12 at the MCA. They join us to chat about painting, perspectives on art history, collaboration and show making in the contemporary context, while always draping one hand back to tradition.

The outro has a guest commentator with a message for Joseph Mohan. After that there is a special surprise for those who hang about for end of the credits. Or maybe not. I thought it was funny. Read more

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This week: Duncan and Richard talk to Madeleine Grynsztejn, the new Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago!

Stolen liberally from the MCA website, with a bit of BAS embellishment:

Grynsztejn was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, and London, England. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and received her BA in art history and French from Newcomb College of Tulane University, and her MA in art history from Columbia University. She is a former Helena Rubenstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a 2007 graduate of the Getty Foundation’s Museum Leadership Institute. Grynsztejn has written, lectured, and taught extensively on contemporary art. She served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Galeria de Arte Nacional in Caracas, among other agencies. She acted as a juror for the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Munich Kunstpreis in Germany, and the Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awards. She has also served on the advisory committees for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the American Center in Paris. She is fluent in English, Spanish, and French. Her husband, Tom Shapiro, is a marketing consultant and a damn nice guy. Yes, Bad at Sports added the “damn nice guy” part, the MCA would never be so inappropriately casual in a blurb! How dare us. The nerve! It’s true though, he really is nice. Read more