Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art

by John Kelsey

Compiled for the first time here, the critic, artist, gallerist, dealer, translator John Kelsey's selected essays gamesomely convey some of the most poignant challenges in the art world and in the many social roles it creates. “When the critic chooses to become a smuggler, a hack, a cook, or an artist,” Kelsey said at a 2007 conference at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, “it's maybe because criticism as such remains tied to an outmoded social relation.” It is precisely this relation that Kelsey intends to not only critique but also to surpass. In this way, Kelsey's “Rich Texts” play the double role of explaining the art world and actively participating in it; they close the distance between the work of art and how we talk about it. Originally published in Artforum —where Kelsey is a contributing editor— Texte zur Kunst , Parkett , and various artists' catalogues, the essays compiled in Rich Texts have all been written over the last decade, and therefore embody a timeliness that strikes at the core of the contemporary art world and the crises that have come to define it. Institut für Kunstkritik Series

Genres: Art

248 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2010

Reviews

[Femke Ooms · Rating 4 out of 5]

top 5 essays uit dit boek

1. My other painting is a car
2. Stop painting painting
3. 100%
4. Big joy time
5. TOP 10 (2007)

[Caleb Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cheeky, Insightful, cool (but not as effortlessly cool as we expect). often straddling theory and the mundane just as well as it toes the line of professional gossip and actual critique,… but also not entirely clear in itself. His takes on specific artists (Krebber and von heyl are highlights) were better than his gestalt pictures which feel like snide asides about the culture as a whole - not that they aren’t true, just not as productive, more gossipy, but it does all comes together to form a picture, a feeling.

Also funny to see this as such a product of its time, theoretically speaking, drawing from the roster of French guys old and new. He’s at his best when he’s working with something like “reena Spaulings” (book) - this collection doesn’t feel as … big, as needed. What gap does it fill? If he didn’t say that shit about krebber, or about art world dinners, someone else might have. That’s modal logic, but whatever.

Worth sitting with the differences in opinion between then and now - this (15 years old) would be at the nadir of the fashion cycle. To me (not ITK) this feels remarkably prescient at points but maybe art and art criticism just isn’t all that different.