This roundtable focuses on the connections between art or culture and class, and on the multiple forms this connection takes today. Even as class distinctions have evolved over the years, and even as the role played by social class in contemporary struggles for social justice and recognition has been obscured, class remains formative of late capitalist subjectivity and continues to have a significant, if mostly unacknowledged, impact on our lives. We have invited scholars and artists who work with the question of class relations in culture to address a series of pertinent questions: does class still function as catalyst for … Read more

This article explores the books of interviews, published in 2024, with the prominent German-American art critic Benjamin Buchloh and his Yugoslavian peer Jerko “Ješa” Denegri. In Exit Interview, Buchloh is interviewed by his colleague and friend Hal Foster; and in The Yugoslav Art Space, Denegri engages in a dialogue with Branislav Dimitrijević and Jelena Vesić, the art critics that came of age during the unraveling of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. While the first book engages in a retrospective view of Buchloh’s career as an art critic, the second one attempts, in Vesić’s words, to establish a dialogical method … Read more

A subversive and poetic take on walking art practice as a tool of expressing dissent/critical stands in a non-offensive manner. This Is The Way is targeting and juxtaposing infrastructure and certain features of police boxes and public toilets, highlighting broad ideas of hygiene, rest and safety together with the mechanics of body control from the perspective of social engineering and critical urbanism. The project was conducted in Tokyo in Summer 2025 as a component of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science fellowship.

ARTMargins, Volume 15, Issue 1, pp. 95-110.

doi:10.1162/ARTM.a.368

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/15/1/95/135571/This-is-the-Way-The-Landmarks-Rethinking-and

Until recently, the museum of modern art was characterized as a critical organ/an
organizer of a retrospective nature. As an institution that appropriates and
coordinates, nothing substantially distinguished its functions from those of a
traditional museum. The peculiarity of a museum of modern art evidently resides in the
need for an available discernment about the most recent productions and debates. But
this museum, modeled on the traditional museum consecrated to ancient art, defined
itself by ultimately operating on the premise that the artwork is a fully executed fact.
In recent years, however, we start imagining a museum organized in accordance … Read more

What to do with the problematic category of the art colony? On the face of it, this question might seem anachronistic for a special issue of ARTMargins. The term art colony conjures up an image of artists retreating from urban centers in the 19th and early 20th centuries to find respite, inspiration, and the support and company of peers in areas of natural beauty. Underpinned by a zurück zur Natur (“back to nature”) philosophy and a desire to paint fisherfolk and farm laborers, rather than professional models posing as such in city ateliers, artist colonies mushroomed in coastal and rural … Read more

In this article, I contend with the theoretical possibilities and pitfalls of rereading communal spaces where black artists in South Africa congregated, studied and created art throughout the 20^th century as black artists’ colonies. Race-based spatial segregation propagated by white bureaucrats denied black artists, especially those based in the large cities of the country, access to the educational, exhibition, and market opportunities available to white artists. Black artists navigated these systems of exclusion through art colonies, many of them established by white individuals, which became creative oases where they could share, learn, produce, and showcase their art. In … Read more

This literature review takes up two books: Residencies Reflected (2024), a collection of essays on artist residencies, edited by Imeli Kokko; and Dot, Circle & Frame: The Making of Papunya Art (2023) by John Kean. The review will argue that Kean’s revisionist account of the “invention” of contemporary Aboriginal art at Papunya in Central Australia in 1971, which gives much more agency to the artists involved than previously, demonstrates that Papunya was effectively an art colony and not an artist residency. Altogether it can be argued that the making of Aboriginal art at a number of locations around Australia in … Read more

The philosopher Adam Smith once observed that when two ideas become associated through frequent repetition, they form a pattern in the imagination of the observer in which one thought eventually seems to flow on naturally from the other, like an imaginary machine. Discovery and colonization have formed such a machine in the story of Captain Cook’s Endeavour, in which artistic practice became implicated in its imperialist mission by transforming what the artists observed into objects of European desire. This photo essay is part of an ongoing investigation by the authors into the creative processes of discovery on Cook’s Endeavour… Read more

To form a creative outlook, people turn to sanggar and art group because formal education institutions have let them down. From all the graduates of fine arts studios (painting, sculpture, graphics, and so on) in our higher education institutions, those who show up in the art scene are too small a part, prompting people to question the effectiveness and benefits of those academic studios’ education.

Academic Education is now inadequate in a most fundamental way: instilling and cultivating enough motivation in pupils to work as artists according to the specialized education that they receive.

ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 3, … Read more