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New Canon
Thursday 11 December 2008 - 8 p.m.
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The new millennium seems to demand concise canons that present a clear selection of highlights from our national cultural history with which everyone can identify. At the same time numerous new, or at least ‘alternative’ art historical surveys are presented in publications and exhibitions that give a voice to artists and artistic expressions previously ignored by the Western mainstream. These apparently contradictory tendencies seem to be pushing the arts in opposite directions. While we focus on the significance of art in terms of issues of national representation and identity (art to bind a divided society), we also judge art by its transnational character and the way it reflects the complexities of a globalised society. What exactly do these revisions of the Western canon imply? What criteria and structural principles are at work in the new canons? How does the ‘canonical principle’ operate in symbolic spaces such as the documenta and other international blockbuster exhibitions or curated group shows?

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Speakers
Robert S. Nelson (US/UK) is Professor of Art History at Yale University. He specialises in the Art of Byzantium and the theory and methods of art history. Nelson is co-editor of Critical Terms for Art History (1996-2003) and author of Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (2003), as well as the eminent essay, The Map of Art History (1997).
Ruth Noack (AUT) is an art historian and co-curator of documenta 12. Noack’s publications include: Shirin Neshat (2000), Double Life: Identity and Transformation in Contemporary Art (2002), Danica Dakic: Role-taking, Role-making (2006) and documenta 12 Catalogue & Reader (2007).

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Moderator
Deborah Cherry (UK) is Chair of the Modern Art Department at the University of Amsterdam and editor of Art History magazine.
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