stedelijk|forum: Douglas Crimp

The Stedelijk Museum, in close collaboration with De Appel arts centre and the University of Amsterdam, is honored to invite acclaimed scholar and curator Douglas Crimp for its stedelijk|forum series, taking place every first Sunday of each month. Crimp will give a keynote lecture on his upcoming book, a memoir-in-progress, and will be available for questions from the audience.

The Stedelijk Museum, in close collaboration with De Appel arts centre and the University of Amsterdam, is honored to invite acclaimed scholar and curator Douglas Crimp for its stedelijk|forum series, taking place every first Sunday of each month. Crimp will give a keynote lecture on his upcoming book, a memoir-in-progress, and will be available for questions from the audience.

Crimp’s lecture, entitled “Art News Parties,” is a highly personal remembrance consisting of a chapter from his memoir-in-progress about New York in the 1970s, Before Pictures. The memoir weaves together stories of the two cultures that were central to his life at that time – gay liberation and the art that came to be called postmodernism. In this presentation, Crimp remembers his first work as an art critic, when he wrote for Art News, the oldest and most established American art magazine. Art News was famous for its support of Abstract Expressionism and for its preference for criticism written by poets, especially the important New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler.

Crimp, however, was not a poet, and he found the poets’ views about early-1970s art old-fashioned and off-putting. He nevertheless found the milieu convivial, especially as experienced at parties hosted by Ashbery, Art News’s executive editor. One of those parties led indirectly to Crimp’s meeting his first boyfriend, and so this chapter also tells the story of their relationship, including their shared cinephilia, their project to write a Moroccan cookbook, and their ill-fated vacation on Cape Cod. All of these strands come together in the figure of Joseph Cornell, whose exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, organized by Crimp’s future boss Diane Waldman, was the first that Crimp saw in New York.

Location: Teijin Auditorium, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Language: English
Entrance: Entrance fee Stedelijk Museum
Reservations: Reservation is required. Please send an e-mail to reservations [​at​] stedelijk.nl, stating your full name, e-mail address, telephone number, and the date of the event for which you want to reserve a seat.

More information about the speaker:
Douglas Crimp is the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, New York, and the author of On the Museum’s Ruins, 1993; Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, 2002; and “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol, 2012. Crimp was the curator of the Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in 1977 and an editor of October magazine from 1977 to 1990. With Lynne Cooke, he organized the exhibition Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the Present for the Reina Sofía in Madrid in the summer of 2010. He is currently at work on a memoir of New York in the 1970s called Before Pictures.