“On Thursday 28th October 1982 a group of black art students hosted The First National Convention of Black Art at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. Their purpose was to discuss ‘the form, function and future of black art’. Thirty years later almost to the day, on Saturday 27th October 2012 a group of artists, curators, art historians and academics will gather, once again in Wolverhampton, to share scholarship and research the ‘black art movement’ of the 1980s, its core debates, precursors and legacies” (from the BLK Art Group website, where you can find the conference programme and archive materials)
“experts agree that much contemporary art is plain bad”
“This week I asked some senior curators working in our publicly funded museums and galleries to name paintings or sculptures by living artists that they thought were examples of contemporary art that had been greatly overrated. The response was surprising. In one case, initial trepidation quickly turned into a no-holds barred deluge of invective concerning the work produced by some of the world’s most famous artists … when it comes to contemporary art yours and my opinion of what is good or bad is largely irrelevant. It is museums and galleries that are the trendsetters and career makers. Which is why it is important that individual curators should feel free to speak their minds […] But they do not.” (Will Gompertz in The Times, 27 October 2012)
“[Gompertz’s] search for critical sincerity in the modern art world might not have had to be so secretive if he had looked outside London. It is a fair assumption that his curators were on the staff of major institutions in the capital.” (letter from Douglas Hall, former Keeper of the Scottish National gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, published in The Times, 3 November 2012)
