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One obligation facing any curator engaging with Heinecken’s work for the Museum of Modern Art is to explain to the audience the pervasive influence on the medium of this museum’s Department of Photography as gatekeeper during the period 1965-85, because much of Heinecken’s activity can best be understood as an oppositional response thereto. […]
I consider it a measure of a certain kind of stubborn integrity that Les Krims, Duane Michals, Kenneth Josephson, and Robert Heinecken continued to self-identify as photographers instead of jumping ship and reinventing themselves as picture-makers in one or another of the art world’s approved categories. They knew the dynamics and politics of the art scene, and understood the price they’d pay for their decision. Which made this an act of principle. […]
Can it be sheer coincidence that this standardization of thought and expression in both visual and verbal modes came out of the same environment? I think not. They emerged at almost exactly the same time, from within the same hothouse ― the international post-secondary art-education system. Their virtually simultaneous birth merely manifests that sheltered microcosm’s belated recognition of something the hardscrabble working class has known for millennia: bullshit makes effective and inexpensive fuel, and if everyone’s using it the smell soon goes unnoticed. […]
Most art-related press releases get written by people who aren’t just art-world wannabes but individuals who have never laid eyes on the work in question. That is, they’re exercises in “How to Write about Art You Haven’t Seen.” That’s because the publicity cycle in the art world runs on a three-month time lag. Let me explain. […]
It’s conceivable that any given postmodernist text you happen upon in print came from The Postmodernism Generator, a website that generates endless postmodern essays via an algorithm. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, since postmodern theory hypothesizes that no original ideas exist, only recycled ones. A recycling machine for the standardized locutions of postmodernist theory comes as a logical extension of that philosophical position. […]
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 SPJ Research Award 2014 Thought for the Day Ignorance is a condition; dumbness is a commitment.
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SPJ Research Award 2014