About
What
Creating Art Value: A Research Project on Trash and Readymades, Art and Ceramics is part of the research programme on Assigning Cultural Values (KULVER), the Research Council of Norway's programme for cultural research for the period 2008 to 2012.
What is trash, and what is art made from trash? What can just be thrown away, and what should be preserved as part of the cultural heritage? What significance does the choice of materials have for the status and value of a work of art? And what significance does the institutional framework have? What art and value paradigms dominate discussions on contemporary art, not just art criticism and art theory discourses but also discussions among artists themselves and what we could call populist criticism of contemporary art? How should institutions like art colleges and museums treat craft art and material-based art when the materials consist of trash and found objects? What skills are required of those who create such work? And how should collections be built and preserved? These are just some of the many questions the research project Creating art value wishes to address.
The main examples will be taken from the world of ceramics. As most people know, the first readymade to acquire real artistic value by being transferred from an everyday context to an art space was a piece of industrial ceramics, a urinal, which Marcel Duchamp used in Fountain in 1917. But that is not the only reason why we wish to focus on ceramics. Major changes have taken place in ceramicists’ practice in the past 20 years. This applies to the introduction of readymades and it applies even more generally to the appropriation of techniques and materials from industrial production. Both these aspects are alien to the studio-ceramics tradition, and they constitute a new paradigm in ceramic art.
The main questions to be addressed in the project will be elucidated from four different perspectives in five sub-projects: one art history-based by Jorunn Veiteberg, one museum-based by Anne Britt Ylvisåker, one philosophy of art-based by Søren Kjørup and two practice-based sub-projects by Kjell Rylander and Caroline Slotte. Read about the projects>
Who
Art historian and professor Jorunn Veiteberg (leader) www.jorunnveiteberg.com (not published yet)
Art historian and senior curator Anne Britt Ylvisåker www.ylvisaker.net
Philosopher and professor Søren Kjørup www.sorenkjorup.dk (not published yet)
Research fellow and artist Kjell Rylander www.kjellrylander.com
Research fellow and artist Caroline Slotte www.carolineslotte.com
Caroline Slotte, Kjell Rylander, Anne Britt Ylvisåker, Jorunn Veiteberg and Søren Kjørup. Photo: H. Bjørgan.
Where
Bergen National Academy of the Arts www.khib.no and Permanenten West Norway Museum of Decorative Art www.kunstmuseene.no.
The project Creating Art Value is part of the efforts made by Bergen National Academy of the Arts since 1999 to boost the academy’s competence and thereby assure it a central place in research and development work in the art field both in Norway and internationally. From 2004 to 2009, part of the academy’s activities in the field were brought together in the Sensuous Knowledge project, which included activities such as an annual international conference, a series of international peer reviewed publications and a home page dedicated to news and dissemination.