Lucy Lippard Overview

Critic Lucy Lippard casts her critical eye upon the arts as they happen, and has been known to spot trends before they happen. She was among the first critics to notice in the late '60s that Conceptual artists were evolving towards... [more]

Critic Lucy Lippard casts her critical eye upon the arts as they happen, and has been known to spot trends before they happen. She was among the first critics to notice in the late '60s that Conceptual artists were evolving towards completely de-materializing the art-object. In the 1970s, when she was "the only art critic championing women's art," she called for a "separate feminist aesthetic consciousness." Lippard is a former art critic for Art in America, The Village Voice, and Z magazine, and the author of 18 books on subjects ranging from Pop art to Native American art. Her theorizing reaches into all realms of art; her texts offer new ways to understand the social and political impulses that create art, and which art, in turn, creates. As one of the earliest feminists, she brought the aesthetic, economic, material, and practical concerns of women artists into the art-historical dialogue. "Get the Message: A Decade of Art for Social Change" explores the relationships between political art, feminism, and leftist politics. "Mixed Blessing: New Art in Multi-cultural America" (1990) asks questions about the state of diversity in art. "The Lure of the Local" (1997) examines how people create their identities from their environments, and defines the local as "the intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology that form the ground on which we stand." Her most recent book, "On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place" (1999), unpacks the cultural voyeurism implicit in the act of "going sight-seeing." Lippard asserts that the tourism business thrives upon giving visitors an idealized picture of sites and people, and that visitors tend to slough off reality in order to see what they paid for. Lippard calls for a "progressive tourism that doesn't exploit local people and doesn't create rifts between personal lives, economic goals, genders, races, and classes." Her assertiveness and prescience have made her a subject of controversy throughout her career, and while she hasn't had all the answers, she's certainly framed the right questions. [show less]