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brian droitcour

@bdroit.bsky.social
802 followers 281 following 63 posts

art critic

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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
while reading the checklist at a gallery group show i saw (b. 2000) and had to sit down
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
laura owens makes work at the intersection of isabella stewart gardner museum and photoshop
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Defector @defector.com · 15/01/2025
The wonder of the regional art museum: defector.com/the-wonder-o...
defector.com
The Wonder Of The Regional Art Museum | Defector
A 24-hour business trip to Cleveland four days before Christmas was a bad idea; I see that now. There wasn’t even that much snow, by Lake Erie standards, but Delta Airlines didn’t seem to care that I ...
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
do i really have to post about the same thing i wrote on instagram, twitter, AND bluesky ?
a photo of a monitor playing an animation showing some outcroppings the wilderness, one of which has a castle on it. the subtitle says “too much”
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
when museum guards tell me to wear my backpack on the front, i want to tell them i can safely keep it on my back because as a gay person i have enhanced spatial awareness
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
the show is so successful, i think, because it acknowledges that materials and mediums are the main concern of artists' work, without shutting down other discourses and histories
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
"The Living End" recognizes how the regeneration of painting through performance and video of the 1960s and 70s was rooted in a critique of white men's dominance of the medium
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
it also includes many artists of color, trans and queer artists, and women. it doesn't put identity at the center but it doesn't ignore it, either--
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
i didn't want to get into it in the review itself, but while writing this I was thinking a lot about Dean Kissick's "Painted Protest" and the reaction to it. "The Living End" is a great example of an exhibition that addresses the present while making meaningful connections to history
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
but Jamillah James, curator of "The Living End," had a brilliant insight that never occurred to me.. she saw performance video as a way for artists to treat painting's gestures as a kind of material, and connected that to the imitation and automation of painterly gestures in contemporary software
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
the exhibition responds to some things I've been thinking about a lot this year, namely how artists are making the connections between art history, particularly the history of painting, and digital media. I wrote an essay on the topic that Eyebeam published in September: eyebeam.org/software-as-...
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
of all the exhibitions about art and technology i've seen, "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020" is my favorite. I reviewed it for my newsletter: www.patreon.com/posts/heres-...
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
the discourse around AI is full of hysteria and hype so i felt encouraged to see museums doing what they should be doing--presenting more thoughtful approaches that help audiences make sense of how AI functions and what it can do. i hope there's more of that in 2025
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
as part of Frieze's year-in-review coverage I wrote about how museums presented the relationship between art and AI in 2024: www.frieze.com/article/year...
frieze.com
The Year in Review: Museums Are Leaving AI Hype Behind
This year, arts institutions jettisoned dead-end questions about art made with artificial intelligence – and instead asked viewers to learn how it works
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
misha
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
My piece highlighting Gen AI “myths” in terms of how we talk about the technology, and what purpose those myths serve, is my self-serving contribution (looking to post a bunch from other folks today too). www.techpolicy.press/challenging-...
techpolicy.press
Challenging The Myths of Generative AI | TechPolicy.Press
Eryk Salvaggio says we must dispense with myths if we are to think more clearly about what AI actually is and does.
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
but it could be an episode of Elsbeth
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
yeah i think it was calculated to cause a stir and that’s part of the problem
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
it’s a bummer that the art world won’t engage in any conversations that aren’t about “identity.” the backlash to dean kissick’s essay just proves his point
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
these were in ps1’s show about the iraq war five years ago!
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
also it includes my thoughts on bluesky and why i hate it but will keep trying to use it
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
anyway, the picks are Sara Cwynar at 55 Walker, wangshui at kurimanzutto, Dean Kissick on the art world's problems, Erin Kissane on the dark forest internet, and "World Computer Sculpture Garden," a group show on the Ethereum blockchain. enjoy
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
there are some thematic echoes among the entries that express the overall outlook of my newsletter: trying to figure out how art and criticism can engage with contemporary media instead of withdrawing into the cloisters
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
yesterday I sent out a newsletter with the third edition of my recommendations of art to look at and things to read. the first two were for subscribers only but i liked how this came out, so i decided to make it public: tinyurl.com/a7hksm95
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Defector @defector.com · 29/11/2024
Why does hotel art look like that? defector.com/why-does-hot...
defector.com
Why Does Hotel Art Look Like That? | Defector
I recently stayed at a blandly business-oriented hotel in San Jose in order to celebrate my birthday, drink a tall boy, and watch the Sharks lose. You know this type of hotel. There were white duvet c...
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
i’m organizing a reading group to discuss Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, meeting both in New York and online. get in touch if you want to join! www.patreon.com/posts/rough-...
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
and for the record i do believe it’s important for institutions to present underrecognized histories, though the best way to do that is through substantially researched historical exhibitions and not as part of a biennial smorgasbord
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
true. i generously read him as critiquing the curatorial framing of these practices (which does often come across as tokenizing) rather than the artists/artworks themselves, but the distinction gets blurred at times
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
though i also recognize that from my vantage point of someone who writes mostly about art and technology i am often thinking about “the digital divide,” as claire bishop put it—the art world’s reluctance to engage with digital media. and that makes me more sympathetic to the argument dean makes here
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
and maybe he didn’t pick the most representative selection of exhibitions, but i do think he identifies some trends that can be widely observed
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
i don’t see a problem with narrowing the field of analysis. it’s necessary when you’re writing a magazine article
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
i guess i think his critique is rooted more in aestheticism/romanticism rather than reactionary politics per se. though those things famously can be connected
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
whether people accept or deny the premise i haven’t seen anyone making a positive case that the dominant trends at high-profile biennials are good
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
there are lots of different art communities for sure, but dean is talking about what’s happening in the network of high visibility, highly professionalized institutions (Venice biennale, whitney, documenta, etc) which i think still can be understood as “the art world”
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
i still haven’t seen anyone rebut Kissick’s main idea and argue that the art world’s obsession with history and escaping the present is actually good
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
"For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn't between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that."
wrecka.ge
against the dark forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
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Johanna Fateman @johannafateman.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
This isn’t an echo chamber for me. I disagree with you all in some way.
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
this museum also presents a very specific side of Beeple as sci-fi visionary, not Beeple as trickster or edgelord or political cartoonist. and i predict that other museums that do Beeple shows will follow suit
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
tldr as with a lot of art that originates online, the most interesting aspects of Beeple’s work are hard to translate to a museum. i don’t think this exhibition resolves those challenges in a particularly successful way
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
last week i went on a press trip to China to see Beeple’s first museum show. i wrote about it for my newsletter tinyurl.com/4whxtm2c
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
i once got yelled at for sitting on the floor there when my train was delayed three hours
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Laura McLean-Ferris @lmcleanferris.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
I thought this was really interesting and at certain moments parallels some of the tensions in Dean's Harper's essay and its reception: www.newyorker.com/culture/open...
newyorker.com
Why Do We Talk This Way?
Technology is dramatically changing political speech, rewarding quantity and variety over the neat messages of the past.
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
i should probably use a normal profile pic instead of the twitter egg, which i thought was hilarious in june 2023. i still think it’s kinda funny though
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
using Selfie to summon followers
gay bear makes peace sign in front of taiwanese pagoda
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
yeah agreed! which is why it’s annoying that the subhed says “how politics ruined contemporary art”
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
if you’re sympathetic to dean kissick’s critque of the art world’s obsession with various histories but skeptical of his complaints about identity art you might like my review
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
last month for my newsletter i wrote a review of the gwangju biennale that praised its orientation toward the future, which makes it stand out among biennials that rummage through the past. www.patreon.com/posts/what-i...
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
i posted a few skeets with my overall view on it earlier
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brian droitcour @bdroit.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
i also think that the trend toward showing historical art from underrecognized regions at biennials started at documenta 12 in 2007
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