A Facebook Post by Burt Kimmelman on June 3, 2015

Thinking about Conceptualism, Kenny Goldsmith and Michael Brown (and maybe Brown U and the U of Penn):

 I’ve been consumed by my reading about the Brown University poetry conference’s disaster (or rather a breakthrough in an American discourse), and am hoping that the completely grounded criticism of Kenny G’s “performance” will eventually do some larger good; for now I, for one, having come late to the conversation, am riveted by it and take it to heart.

 Rather than say more in words, I’m posting some photos here, which I took today from inside the Whitney Museum (where Michael Heller and I got to spend some time). I guess it’s silly to speak about coincidence; perhaps I saw the relevance of the art works more than I would have had I not been reading and thinking about what has happened, an event for which I feel ashamed (I was not at the conference).

 In the images I’m including with this comment note that the tags on the uniforms of the museum guards say, in one case, “The Whitney Museum.” (The tableau sculpture, “Guarded View,” is by Fred Wilson. The other work, “An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer,” is by John Baldessari.)

 

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Whitney Guards

 

 

 

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