An acquaintance of mine, an artist and critic and now an administrator, told me of an assignment he gave to his first-year MFA students. He asked them to go to the library and seek out an art magazine from the month and year they were born, write down the names of 25 artists from the advertisements and reviews and to bring them back to the seminar. One could take this as an opening, I suppose, a generous, and perhaps fruitful, way of opening up a more closely focused history than that of the standard undergraduate survey, of offering more images and approaches, more material to be worked on and with, something beyond the names of artists and artworks they already knew. As it happens, this wasn’t quite what its author intended. His project wasn’t one of affirmative history — a making fuller of the past; his intention was rather more negative and critical: to disenchant the present, to put his students on warning that most of them 20 years out would be, at best, a name in an advertisement in a very old art magazine. The present always seems full, as much as two or three monthly art magazines can hold, a present of possibilities; the past that the assignment points back to is always closing, always dwindling. History in this sense always has a point, a kind of vanishing point.

Excellence and Pluralism (East of Borneo)

A little more Singerman. Good assignment.

(via notational)