'Good Art/Bad Art' April 11?12

Over the ages, people have tended to agree on what is good art and what is bad. But during the past few decades, radical new works of art and literature seemed to upend traditional measures of evaluation, leaving open answers to such questions. Good and bad art, poetry and visual art, aesthetic values and artistic quality will be explored at Skidmore on April 11 and 12 in a two-day conference titled "Good Art/Bad Art: What Are Aesthetic Values?"

	Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel, 1994

Free and open to the public, the conference will take place from 2 to 6 p.m. Friday, April 11, and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, April 12, in the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. The interdisciplinary conference is presented by the Tang Museum, the College's Department of English, and Salmagundi, the intellectual quarterly of humanities and social sciences published at Skidmore.

The conference's speakers represent are critics, scholars, and writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, criticism, and dance. They include New Republic art critic Jed Perl, New York Review of Books critic Andrew Delbanco, Jihad vs. McWorld author Benjamin Barber, Salmagundi art critic Charles Molesworth, Rochelle Gurstein, Brenda Weinapple, James Longenbach, Leah Kreutzer Barber, and Tom Healy. Skidmore participants will include Tang Museum director John Weber and Tang curator Ian Berry, along with English department faculty members Robert Boyers, Terence Diggory, Carolyn Forch , and Sarah Goodwin. Assembled around a large conference table, the 15 speakers will discuss the issues and also look at selected short poems and paintings.

According to Boyers, professor and editor of Salmagundi, who organized and will moderate the conference, agreement over what is good and bad art became harder to achieve during the "culture wars of the 1990s," when a number of influential critics began to decry the idea of "quality" in art and to associate quality with artistic and cultural repression. Many chose to evaluate works of art solely on their content rather than on their quality. Such choices, Boyers points out, influence decisions about what museums should exhibit, what teachers should recommend in their classes, and how students should be taught to write "more effective poems" and to make "more accomplished paintings."

For more information about Good Art/Bad Art, e-mail Boyers at rboyers@skidmore.edu.