Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti]

Talk for The Geopolitical Turn: Art and the Contest of Globalisation Conference 08 May 2010 at Nottingham Contemporary, UK.

What are the reference points for contemporary art in a global economy that creates enormous wealth as well as widening inequality? The opening conference explores the many strategies artists use to reveal the processes and human consequences of the globalised market economy.

Over the past five years Alfredo Cramerotti has written about the aesthetic merger of contemporary art and the news media. By adopting the ubiquitous tropes of interviews, graphic mapping, and Magnum style photography an increasing number of artists have borrowed from these visual languages to present their work into a context closely aligned with investigative journalism. Drawing from his recent book Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing (2009, Intellect) and select works from Uneven Geographies, Cramerotti will be speaking about the growing overlap between global news media and contemporary art.

By addressing this topic Cramerotti will seek to answer a number of questions including: Does such an integration of art and journalism emancipate art from a closed sphere of discourse allowing it a more social and political dimension? Does the use of an investigative methodology within contemporary art practice shift an understanding of truth and subjectivity? By borrowing from forms of news media, what new modes of exhibition practice are artists, curators, and writers enabling to develop cultural relationships between the global relevance to local issues?

Audio of talk available at: nottinghamcontemporary.org/sites/default/files/Alfredo_Cramerotti.mp3