BiographyDecter has taught and lectured
at a wide range of national and international museums, arts organizations, colleges and universities over the past twenty-five
years. Currently, he is a graduate faculty member in the School of Visual Art’s M.A. Curatorial Practice program in New York.
Decter has also taught at The Cooper Union, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, The School of the Art Institute
of Chicago, New York University, UCLA, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and Bennington College. From 2007 to 2011,
he was Director of the Master of Public Art Studies Program at the USC’s Roski School in Los Angeles, where he founded the
M.A. Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere program. Decter has organized and participated in numerous international
conferences, and recently co-chaired a seminar at the European Forum Alpbach, Austria, entitled,
Art as Enlightenment
in Post-Enlightenment Times?What, indeed, is going on? What have become of politics in the age of the distraction-experience
economy? What has become of the arts in the age of the distraction-experience economy? What do we want from the arts and other
forms of cultural production in these times of political and social upheaval? How to be human today? Can we design a better
humanity, and a better politics? Or, are we biological anachronisms in an emergent bot and AI world? We seem to be at an inflection
point wherein the tenuous fabric that holds together liberal democracy – an incomplete project emblematic of the contradictions
of the Enlightenment – may be tearing itself apart, perhaps giving way to illiberalism, right wing populism, ultra-nationalism,
increased episodes of public racism, neo-nihilism, and crypto-fascism. Are we entering a period of post-democratic democracy?
In this transdisciplinary seminar, we will endeavor to think such questions in terms of our contradictions as human beings
in a world that seems increasingly post-humanist, if not post-human. We will consider examples from art, media, social media,
cinema, technology, architecture, music, urbanism and other sources to reconsider how our complex agencies, our fluid identities
and genders, navigate contemporary uncertainty. What do we expect from the arts and other forms of cultural production in
times of increased ideological polarization, political fragmentation, racial, ethnic and religious tensions, and global refugee
and immigration crises? Can the arts build new coalitions and solidarities to resist the breakdown of civil, democratic society?
Or is art emblematic of the conflicts, antagonisms, and contradictions of broader society? Is contradiction art’s power? Can
artists and other cultural producers repair social injustices, and work ethically on behalf of civil and human rights? Are
these art’s responsibilities? So how do we live together, civilly, with our differences? How do we avoid reproducing the very
conditions that we seek to critique? When we question authority and power, do we also question our own authority and power?
How do we want to be governed in relation to how we may want to govern ourselves? How can we speak of ethics without at the
same time taking responsibility for our own ethics? Is it our job to be responsibly irresponsible, and pragmatically unpragmatic?
Are we at once empowered and disempowered on social media? Have we Selfied ourselves into post-selfhood oblivion? Can we Tweet
our way to emancipation? Can we design an app to save the world… from ourselves? Or has the anthropocene crisis already rendered
such questions mute?
Bitte unter
info@uni-ak.ac.at mit Namen und Matrikelnummer anmelden.Termine24.04.2017
- 10:15 bis 11:45 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
25.04.2017 - 10:15 bis 11:45 | Seminarraum 2 (SR B)
26.04.2017 - 15:30
bis 17:00 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
27.04.2017 - 12:00 bis 13:30 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
28.04.2017 - 13:44 bis 15:14
| Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
02.05.2017 - 18:45 bis 20:15 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
03.05.2017 - 14:30 bis 16:00 | Seminarraum
8 (HS 4)
04.05.2017 - 15:30 bis 17:00 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
05.05.2017 - 17:15 bis 18:45 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
08.05.2017 - 10:15 bis 11:45 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
10.05.2017 - 14:30 bis 16:00 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
11.05.2017
- 11:45 bis 13:15 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
12.05.2017 - 13:45 bis 15:15 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
15.05.2017 - 10:15
bis 11:45 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
16.05.2017 - 18:45 bis 20:15 | Seminarraum 8 (HS 4)
