Biggs, M. y Karlsson, H., The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, Routledge: Londres y Nueva York, 2011.

The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts is a major collection of new writings on research in the creative and performing arts by leading authorities from around the world. It provides theoretical and practical approaches to identifying, structuring and resolving some of the key issues in the debate about the nature of research in the arts which have surfaced during the establishment of this subject over the last decade.

Contributions are located in the contemporary intellectual environment of research in the arts, and more widely in the universities, in the strategic and political environment of national research funding, and in the international environment of trans-national cooperation and communication. The book is divided into three principal sections – Foundations, Voices and Contexts – each with an introduction from the editors highlighting the main issues, agreements and debates in each section.

The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts addresses a wide variety of concepts and issues, including:

-  the diversity of views on what constitutes arts-based research and scholarship, what it should be, and its potential contribution;

- the trans-national communication difficulties arising from terminological and ontological differences in arts-based research;

- traditional and non-traditional concepts of knowledge, their relationship to professional practice, and their outcomes and audiences;

-  a consideration of the role of written, spoken and artefact-based languages in the formation and communication of understandings.

This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of arts-based research by setting down a framework for addressing these, and other, topical issues. It will be essential reading for research managers and policy-makers in research councils and universities, as well as individual researchers, research supervisors and doctoral candidates.

Birnbaum, D., Menke, C., The Power of Judgement. A debate on Aesthetic Critique, Stenrberg Press: Nueva York, 2010.

The Power of Judgment both attests to the importance of judgment in art criticism and argues against its determining verdicts. Comprised of a lecture by Christoph Menke and two respective responses to it by Daniel Loick and Isabelle Graw, this book brings together a dialogue on judgment originally begun at the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.

“Pointing to the necessity of an aesthetic judgment that produces controversy and dissent, The Power of Judgment deliberately takes up a proposition that can be debated.”

Design by Surface, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin

Mate, R., Medianoche en la historia. Comentarios a las tesis de Walter Benjamin “Sobre el concepto de historia”, Trotta: Madrid, 2010.

El comentario es un viejo género literario filosófico, uno de los más genuinos. Pero raramente es un género creativo literariamente y, en general, resulta poco atractivo para los legos. Reyes Mate, sin embargo, ha conseguido algo tan infrecuente como convertir un comentario riguroso, clásicamente estructurado y conceptualmente profundo, en un libro de gran dignidad literaria. Es el producto de aquella madurez que se ha tornado en sabiduría y que a veces los pensadores genuinos encuentran en el otoño de la vida. Imprescindible para los que padezcan la enfermedad de la benjaminofilia, pero también para los que, un poco hartos de San Walter Benjamin, estamos esperando una revisión de su obra a la altura de los tiempos.

Vilar, G. (2010), Desartización. Paradojas del arte sin fin, EUSAL: Salamanca

Hay que seguir distinguiendo el arte de las meras prácticas culturales en general. El arte, lo que llamamos arte sin fin, existe, y es tan necesario como en el pasado, aunque en muchas ocasiones sea menos evidente que en otros tiempos. Las razones de un arte sin fin no pueden ser las de un arte desartizado en el que, siguiendo tendencias que parecen imparables, se han borrado todas las diferencias y todas las fronteras con la vida. Entkunstung o desartización es el término que T.W. Adorno acuñó a principios de los años cincuenta del siglo pasado para referirse al proceso dialéctico por el que el arte (o más bien el Arte) pierde progresivamente sus cualidades y rasgos tradicionales para convertirse en otra cosa. Pensó esa otra cosa ante todo como producto de la industria cultural, como víctima de las fuerzas ideológicas que dominan la sociedad administrada y, en última instancia, como mera mercancía y, por consiguiente, como un producto cosificado que deja de ser un modo esencial de pensar el mundo. El mundo del arte contemporáneo conoce muy bien esta clase de procesos, muchas veces paradójicos. En un sentido dialéctico, el arte se ha desartizado en cada momento que se ha presentado negativamente respecto a alguna de sus caualidades tradicionales: cuando ha maltratado a la belleza, al desestetizarse, al desmaterializarse, al intelectualizarse, al tecnologizarse, al efimerizarse, etc. La mayoría de estos movimientos fueron percibidos por muchos en su momento como pasos hacia una desartización entendida negativamente, mientras que posteriormente se han concebido como momentos de la redefinición del arte. El propio Adorno interpretó correctamente la atonalidad como un paso en la redefinición de la música, pero, en cambio, la incorporación de ritmos del jazz en las obras de Strawinsky o Gershwin como pasos puramente negativos en dirección a la cosificación. Pero también hay otros tipos de pasos que Adorno no identificó porque ya no tuvo tiempo de reflexionar sobre ellos, pues la categoría de desartización es evidentemente una categoría histórica en sus contenidos además de ser una categoría sistemática. Cada generación a identificado cosas distintas como síntomas o signos de la desartización. También hoy, aunque todo indica que actualmente hemos dado con un límite. Así el arte se desartiza hoy muchas veces para convertirse en una práctica cultural de otro tipo, política, antropológica, o de cualquier otra índole, pero una prática cultural cualquiera ya no es arte. Cuando se produce la fusión del arte y la vida, paradójicamente, desaparece el arte.

Lind, Maria,  Selected Maria Lind Writing, Sternberg Press: Nueva York y Londres, 2010.

Edited by Brian Kuan Wood

Selections and responses by Beatrice von Bismarck, Ana Paula Cohen, Liam Gillick, Brian Kuan Wood, and Tirdad Zolghadr

Working in a number of contexts and capacities has shown Maria Lind to be a curator who, over time, has engaged in a rethinking of the art institution and the formats and methodologies connected with it, taking art itself as a starting point. Following on the various endgames outlined by institutional critique, Lind has forged paths out of hegemonic institutional regimes precisely by identifying other ways of working through them, from both inside and outside.

For Lind, writing is integral to her curatorial work. It is where she accounts for her decisions, explains her intention, justifies her interest, toys with new possibilities and develops new ideas, and recognizes historical precedents. It is where the craft of curating, already pointed out towards a public, finds another channel of articulation.

Selected Maria Lind Writing brings together twenty-two essays selected by Beatrice von Bismarck, Ana Paula Cohen, Liam Gillick, Brian Kuan Wood, and Tirdad Zolghadr.

The collection of essays spanning from 1997 to 2010 forms a tapestry of Lind's own interweaving interests, but also of those of a panel of readers invited by Lind to project their own concerns onto her corpus of writing. Essays on individual artists, monographic and group exhibitions, funding structures, new contexts and spatial paradigms, together comprise a rare opportunity to swivel a spotlight on its axis back towards a figure who always tries to aim it at what really matters.

Maria Lind is a curator and writer based in Stockholm. She was the director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2008 to 2010. She was director of Iaspis in Stockholm 2005 to 2007 and from 2002 to 2004 was the director of Kunstverein München. From 1997 to 2001, Lind was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where she was responsible for Moderna Museet Projekt. She was co-curator of Manifesta 2 in 1998. Lind has contributed widely to magazines and other publications, as well as to numerous exhibition catalogues. She was the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

Design by Liam Gillick

Jarque, Vicente, Historia, progreso y arte contemporáneo, Institució Alfons el Magnànim: Valencia, 2010.

El libro pretende ofrecer un examen de la relación entre historia y relato, tomando como punto de partida las dificultades para narrar el curso disperso del arte actual, siguiendo con un repaso de la confrontación de la idea de la historia universal y del progreso desde la ilustración hasta el siglo XX, en conexión con la tradición de las humanidades, con vistas a la formulación de unos mínimos parámetros hermenéuticos que ayuden a una provisoria ubicación del arte presente en el contexto de la cultura contemporánea.

Le Feuvre, Lisa, Failure, Documents of Contemporary Art, Londres: Whitechapel/MIT, 2010.

Amid the global uncertainties of our times, failure has become a central subject of investigation in recent art. Celebrating failed promises and myths of the avant-garde, or setting out to realize seemingly impossible tasks, artists have actively claimed the space of failure to propose a resistant view of the world. Here success is deemed overrated, doubt embraced, experimentation encouraged, and risk considered a viable strategy. The abstract possibilities opened up by failure are further reinforced by the problems of physically realizing artworks—wrestling with ideas, representation, and object-making. By amplifying both theoretical and practical failure, artists have sought new, unexpected ways of opening up endgame situations, ranging from the ideological shadow of the white cube to unfulfilled promises of political emancipation. Between the two subjective poles of success and failure lies a space of potentially productive operations where paradox rules and dogma is refused. This collection of writings, statements, mediations, fictions, polemics, and discussions identifies failure as a core concern in cultural production. Failure identifies moments of thought that have eschewed consensus, choosing to address questions rather than answers.

Artists surveyed include: Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Phil Collins, Martin Creed, David Critchley, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Isa Genzken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Félix González-Torres, Wade Guyton, International Necronautical Society, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Michael Krebber, Bruce Nauman, Simon Patterson, Janette Parris, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Allen Ruppersberg, Roman Signer, Annika Ström, Paul Thek, William Wegman

Writers include: Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Daniel Birnbaum, Bazon Brock, Johanna Burton, Emma Cocker, Gilles Deleuze, Russell Ferguson, Ann Goldstein, Jörg Heiser, Jennifer Higgie, Richard Hylton, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Lisa Lee, Stuart Morgan, Hans-Joachim Müller, Karl Popper, Edgar Schmitz, Coosje van Bruggen