“WHAT’S THE POINT OF ART WHEN THE WORLD IS ENDING?” - Lecture.
A few weeks ago, a scheduling clash meant I had the challenge (and pleasure) of pre-recording a lecture for Harvard GSD, titled: “WHAT’S THE POINT OF ART WHEN THE WORLD IS ENDING?” The lecture explored a strand of speculative art (circa 2010–2020) that I was deeply involved in - work that often functioned as kinds of emotive infographics for complex environmental, social and global questions.
I connected this to the Art+Science, participatory, and co-creative movements of recent decades, asking how these approaches have reshaped the conditions of practice: our roles as artists, our agency, our funding structures, and our freedom of expression.
That week’s seminar readings, “Art in the Anthropocene” (Davis & Turpin, 2015), and “Terra Fluxus“ (Corner 2006), framed this discussion within a broader context of planetary crisis, asking what role art can play when ecological collapse and human futures are at stake. I wish I had more time to get into the curator versus artist agency debate - but alas, 1 hour flies by.
To ground these ideas, I shared some of my own projects:
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
The seminar readings of the week were:
Davis, H. M., & Turpin, E. (2015). Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction [Introduction]. In H. M. Davis & E. Turpin (Eds.), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments, and epistemologies (pp. xx–xx). Open Humanities Press.
Corner, J. (2006). Terra Fluxus. In C. Waldheim (Ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader (pp. xx–xx). Princeton Architectural Press.
