Is This a Good Painting? #1

stedelijk│reading group
1st Reading group as part of the exhibition 'Bourgeois Leftovers'.
Date: May 24, 2013, 4 – 5:45 pm
Location: Stedelijk Museum, gallery space
Reservations: It is necessary to make a reservation. Send an e-mail to reservation@deappel.nl, stating your full name, e-mail address, telephone number, and the date of the program you want to attend.

Text:
Boris Groys, “On the New” in Art Power, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

The title of the reading group is borrowed from Marcel Broodthaers’ “Interview with a Cat,” in which the artist asks his cat to evaluate a painting’s value. Texts by Boris Groys, Susan Sontag, and Donald Barthelme will be introduced in relation to such topics as the status of objects in museum collections, the notion of “contemporaneity,” and ways of establishing value.

“Bourgeois Leftovers” began with an interest in the “leftover” status assigned to a set of historical paintings found at the Van Abbemuseum in October 2012, and its relation to questions of “newness” and the pressure to be contemporary. To revisit this point of departure, this first reading session will draw attention to the questions Boris Groys raises about the museum’s role in distinguishing between old and new, as well as the ways in which current artistic production operates in relation to this distinction and to the legacy of the fine arts.

More information on 'Bourgeois Leftovers'

“Bourgeois Leftovers,” the exhibition of de Appel’s 2012-2013 Curatorial Programme, presents 32 Dutch genre paintings borrowed from the Van Abbemuseum together with commissions and contributions by contemporary artists. Produced between roughly 1910 and 1939, many of these still lifes, landscapes, and portraits were part of the founding collection of the Van Abbemuseum, but they have not been selected for display in the museum. “Bourgeois Leftovers” sets the stage for 19 contemporary artists to co-produce the presentation of the paintings. Two main approaches come to the fore in the exhibition: the first considers each painting as a guest within de Appel’s exhibition spaces, with its own individual history and unique condition. The second sees the paintings as a conceptual entity: a group of leftovers, the surplus of a collection. From this angle, the paintings become a microcosm for present-day questions of the role of cultural heritage in the context of populism; (de-)collection and acquisition policies of museums during times of economic austerity; and notions of artistic and financial value, and how this is determined and by whom.

Please visit www.bourgeoisleftovers.com for more information.