'"What do you say about homosexuals?" Gene Swenson’s "Other "Tradition'

Dense online lecture from the Courtauld Research Forum looking at an interview between the art critic Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol.

Just occasionally I sign up to an online talk where I wish I knew a bit more about the subject before I’d joined in. The talk looked in depth at the art critical philosophy of Swenson but, I have to admit, I’d never heard of him so I was a little at sea. However I did look him afterwards and will look out for his work and ideas in future.

The core of the talk looked at an interview with Andy Warhol which was used as the basis for a profile of the artist in the journal “Art News” and quoted in much of the later works on Warhol. However the speaker, Jennifer Sichel, from the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville, has recently discovered the original tapes which show that substantial sections of the interview were left out or adapted particularly around questions of homosexuality.

She also looked at how this interview later led to Swenson curating a show in 1966 called “The Other Tradition” which led to the idea of Eccentric Abstraction” and also introduced us to the collection of his notebooks which she also discovered in his archive.

 

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