AICA Awards Ceremony Reported on Art Blogs Around the World

The AICA Awards ceremony reported on art blogs around the world including, China, Japan, Brazil, Chile, France, and Latvia.

art.china.cn (In Chinese)

Artscape (In Japanese)

Novos Curadores (In Portuguese)

Arte Al Limite (In Spanish)

art.anazana.com (In Latvian)

Art Media Agency (In French)

As reported in The Huffington Post by AICA-USA member Lisa Paul Streitfeld:

AICA Awards 2011: Establishing a Narrative

Before attending the 26th Annual AICA Awards at the Guggenheim Museum last year, I traveled the circular path through the engrossing Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention at the Jewish Museum; and discovered curator Mason Klein engaged in a passionate defense of his (r)evolutionary approach to the monograph: narrative. Meeting Klein at the reception following the 2011 International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Awards Ceremony at the brand new academic building for the Cooper Union Advancement of Science and Art, we continued the discussion. If the AICA critics, myself included, failed to recognize other exhibitions that illuminated human consciousness as the catalyst to the creation of art, it is because such narrative is not an accepted approach to curation...
...At a time that criticism -- which completes the cycle of consciousness between artist and audience -- itself is in crisis... The annual AICA Awards have progressively gotten more polished, and more articulate of the role the critical apparatus plays in recognizing curatorial excellence in the decade since I have been a member of the organization.
The rest of this article can be forund at The Huffington Post

The award winning Iranian artist Sharin Neshat set the tone for the evening by defining risk-taking in art as a choice between internal persecution and external exile.

Update: May 11, 2011

AICA Awards recently mentioned in ARTnews, May 2011

Eyes on the Prizes

Painter and critic Peter Plagens joked there should have been a black carpet outside Thom Mayne’s structure for the Cooper Union on the Bowery, given what was going on inside—an art awards ceremony. But the organizers of this particular event—the United States section of the International Association of Art Critics—preferred a less glam approach, akin to the New York Film Critics Circle Awards or the Drama Desk Awards, as they honored curators from venues across the country for last year’s outstanding exhibitions.

The scholarly tone didn’t prevent some of the honorees from gushing and joking as they received their prizes. Among the winners were Drawing Center director Brett Littman (best show in a nonprofit space, “Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion”), art historian Paul Hayes Tucker (best show in a commercial New York gallery, “Claude Monet: Late Work”), Hirshhorn chief curator Kerry Brougher (best historical museum show, nationally, “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers”), and Marina Abramovic ́, who won best monographic museum show in New York for “The Artist Is Present,” at MoMA. “I can finally prove that performance is artwork,” said the artist, signaling up to her late mother before thanking the museum’s 86 securi- ty guards for protecting her and the 40 often-nude performers of her pieces.

Then John Elderfield, MoMA’s former chief curator of painting and sculpture, accepted the award for best monographic museum show, “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917,” which was installed right after Abramovic ́’s show came down. When it was time to hang Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle (1908), Elderfield said, museum staff showed him oddly discolored marks on the floor. It turned out they were caused by oil from the feet of the two naked perform- ers who stood on either side of a door- way in one of the most discussed pieces in Abramovic ́’s show. That Matisse’s naked bathers—his “first great sculptural anguished figure painting”— would hang in this very spot, he said, was a moving “meeting of past and present.”