Sean O’Toole

27/04/11

• 1

  Leigh Bowery’s Immaculate Conception by Michael Bracewell

  Issue 19, November–December 1994

  Under Leigh Bowery. ‘As a sign, his body was singular.’

• 2

  King of Cacafuego by Adrian Searle

  Issue 20, January-February 1995

  Taking Brian Sewell for a spin. ’Brian Sewell, in frieze! As they say in the south of Johannesburg, Nooit! (Translation, Ee bah gum!) “Criticism ought to be creative and speculative (if not, why bother to write at all)…”’

• 3

  Occupied Territories by Okwui Enwezor

  Issue 26, January-February 1996

  africa95. 'A guiding text, manifesto-like in its clarity: ‘Why do we never consider the achievements of those artists who at great professional cost and individual isolation have not only transcended but have equally transfigured the borders constituting the notion of Africanity?’'

• 4

  IKEA at the End of Metaphysics by Daniel Birnbaum

  Issue 31, November-December 1996

  Art and the IKEA spirit. 'Never mind what Harold Rosenberg said of ‘kitsch criticism’ and ‘mass culture intellectuals’, this is seminal – if for entirely personal reasons. I did penance at Mr. Kamprad’s Brent Cross branch. I have no recollection of serving Mr. Birnbaum, who wrote, ‘At the end of metaphysics, levelling is complete – no one questions the catalogue.’'

• 5

  Rules of the Game by Ralph Rugoff

  Issue 44, January-February 1999

  'A riposte, of sorts, to my third selection; also an anticipatory preview of the decade to come: ‘Perhaps it’s no coincidence that one meaning of the Latin root of ‘prostitute’ is ‘to publicly expose or exhibit’; likewise, most art gets exhibited in ways that leave no doubt as to how it should be regarded.’'

• 6

  Strange Fascination by Jan Verwoert

  Issue 71, November-December 2002

  Pleasure and Criticism. ‘… the question remains whether the discourse on aesthetic experience has ever truly escaped from the bourgeois Bermuda triangle of the need for social distinction, the cultivation of taste and the control of affects.’

• 7

  The African Pavilion by Kodwo Eshun

  Issue 109, September 2007

  ‘Momentarily you could imagine other exhibitions, secreted within the unconvincing grandiosity of the Pavilion, and begin to fantasize about the singularity of the solitary work hidden within the hubris of overcompensation.’

• 8

  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by James Elkins

  Issue 118, October 2008

  ‘… does Charles Baudelaire count as a precursor to contemporary art criticism? Not if you judge by the way people write, because no one emulates Baudelaire.’

• 9

  A Serious Business by Dan Fox

  Issue 121, March 2009

  What does it mean to be a professional artist? ‘Where’s the fucking stipend?’ Indeed.

• 10

  Notes to Self by Vivian Rehberg

  Issue 131, May 2010

  What art writing can learn from the lessons of literature. ‘… why don’t more art writers stray from the well-trodden path in order to privilege great narrators, over theorists, art historians and art critics, as their authorial models?’

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