The production of taonga is a sovereign Māori tradition closely guarded in contemporary Māori society. Many Contemporary Māori Artists observe taonga principles in their work though these qualities are stifled within the New Zealand art system. In the 1990s these subjects were fiercely debated resulting in Contemporary Māori Art being defined differently to the ancestral tradition of taonga. This debate created a rupture, which disturbs the practice of Māori art and is a major concern in the emerging practice of Māori art history. Reviving earlier arguments for Contemporary Māori Art to be defined according to the principles of taonga, this thesis applies the concept of ‘contemporary taonga’ to the art works of Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura), to argue that taonga production is active in contemporary Māori life and offers a new method to reconcile Māori art histories.  The practice of Kaupapa Māori research and theory enlivened the taonga principles of Brett Graham’s art works. Intensive accounts of two art works, produced a decade apart, reveal ‘contemporary taonga’ to be a collaborative process involving recognition and instrumentalisation by authoritative Māori viewers. Kahukura (1996), produced in response to the debates was, however, overwhelmed by competing interests of the time. Āniwaniwa (2006) undertook an arduous journey—to the centre of the Western art world in order to be shown within the artist’s tribal rohe—where Ngāti Koroki Kahukura kaumātua recognised Graham as a tohunga. Iwi leaders also employed Āniwaniwa in their Treaty of Waitangi claims process, functionalising the art work as taonga to support the advancement of their people. Āniwaniwa then left New Zealand to play a role in the formalisation of an international indigenous art network.   As a type for contemporary taonga, Āniwaniwa is an expansive model to introduce this concept to contemporary art discourse. The impact of this concept is yet to be realised though immediately reconciles long-standing issues in Māori art. ‘Contemporary taonga’ has the potential to radically reconcieve, and reorganise, Contemporary Māori Art practice and history according to the practice of ancestral Māori traditions and determined by the authority and agency of Māori people.

My research is concerned with the formation of artists as creative subjects in an increasingly neoliberalised art world. This study examines to what extent does the artist-run space offer alternatives to current neoliberal orthodoxy in the art world. There has been little research to understand the lived experiences of emerging visual artists within neoliberalism. The thesis is located in museum studies but stretches beyond this field in an interdisciplinary approach to explore the complexity of what it means to both make art and self-organise.  The thesis presents multiple case-study research into three New Zealand artist-run spaces; RM, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space and Meanwhile. Qualitative research brings the experiences of artist-run space participants to the fore through interviews, examining how they understand and articulate their involvement, negotiate tensions over power, and position themselves in an art world that seeks to enfold them in its own narratives. I analyse and discuss the findings through a series of connecting theoretical frameworks—assemblage theory, creative labour and governmentality—which together map the distinct practices that shape, and reshape, the artist-run space.  My research contributes to literature on creative workers within neoliberalism, providing new knowledge about tactics and strategies deployed by emerging visual artists to carve space for their activities on their own terms. The thesis argues that while artist-run spaces are embedded in the mainstream through both networks of strategic reciprocity and funding imperatives, the nuances which define an individual artist-run space are both broader and messier than their increasingly formal structure suggests. The identity formation of the artists and creative workers whose hard work and passion keep artist-run spaces going is similarly compromised, confounding simplistic readings. I propose that the notion of ‘alternative’ is too binary an understanding to describe artist-run spaces within a time of neoliberalism, instead, this thesis seeks to complicate and problematise the term.

This thesis is a response to an emergent discourse on the relationship between the visual arts and the Anthropocene. The latter—the stratigraphic designation for a new geological epoch—has accrued a popularity within the contemporary art-world that is rarely afforded to a concept from the earth sciences. The uptake in Anthropocene-themed exhibitions, publications, and think-pieces reflects the concept’s promise of an art-making and art-critical methodology that may foster a revised relationship to nature in the age of climate change.   Despite the new-found fashionability of the term, this relationship between art and the Anthropocene has neither been comprehensively demonstrated, nor disproved. Consequently, the purpose of this thesis is to undertake this necessary interrogation.   Firstly, this is an engagement with the competing philosophies and intentions that have attached themselves to the Anthropocene label as it progressed from a straightforward geological statement, into a profound suite of assertions regarding the relationship of humanity to our planet. The influence of the posthumanist ecological philosopher, Timothy Morton, is a particular focus for understanding what the aesthetic theory of the Anthropocene consists of. Taken together, this theory is a promise of a new relationship with the natural world through the jettisoning of Romantic fantasies of nature in favour of an engagement with a sub-discursive, material world.   Secondly, this theory is read against ecologically conscious contemporary art works. The practices of Pierre Huyghe, Simon Starling, and Conor Clarke speak to the same concerns as the aesthetic Anthropocene. Reading these works through the lens offered by the stratigraphic concept investigates and tests the capability of the aesthetic Anthropocene for delivering its promises of an art without nature, and a new engagement with our environments.   Ultimately, the innovations of the aesthetic Anthropocene are novel, plentiful, but unconvincing. As a theory, it is beset by flaws and contradictions which undermine its applicability and critical potential. Consequently, ecologically conscious art does little to reflect the aims and aspirations of the aesthetic Anthropocene, rendering it an unhelpful tool for understanding the geological present.

This thesis is a response to an emergent discourse on the relationship between the visual arts and the Anthropocene. The latter—the stratigraphic designation for a new geological epoch—has accrued a popularity within the contemporary art-world that is rarely afforded to a concept from the earth sciences. The uptake in Anthropocene-themed exhibitions, publications, and think-pieces reflects the concept’s promise of an art-making and art-critical methodology that may foster a revised relationship to nature in the age of climate change.   Despite the new-found fashionability of the term, this relationship between art and the Anthropocene has neither been comprehensively demonstrated, nor disproved. Consequently, the purpose of this thesis is to undertake this necessary interrogation.   Firstly, this is an engagement with the competing philosophies and intentions that have attached themselves to the Anthropocene label as it progressed from a straightforward geological statement, into a profound suite of assertions regarding the relationship of humanity to our planet. The influence of the posthumanist ecological philosopher, Timothy Morton, is a particular focus for understanding what the aesthetic theory of the Anthropocene consists of. Taken together, this theory is a promise of a new relationship with the natural world through the jettisoning of Romantic fantasies of nature in favour of an engagement with a sub-discursive, material world.   Secondly, this theory is read against ecologically conscious contemporary art works. The practices of Pierre Huyghe, Simon Starling, and Conor Clarke speak to the same concerns as the aesthetic Anthropocene. Reading these works through the lens offered by the stratigraphic concept investigates and tests the capability of the aesthetic Anthropocene for delivering its promises of an art without nature, and a new engagement with our environments.   Ultimately, the innovations of the aesthetic Anthropocene are novel, plentiful, but unconvincing. As a theory, it is beset by flaws and contradictions which undermine its applicability and critical potential. Consequently, ecologically conscious art does little to reflect the aims and aspirations of the aesthetic Anthropocene, rendering it an unhelpful tool for understanding the geological present.

This essay revisits Hal Foster's essay in Marcus and Myers’ The Traffic in Culture (1995), “The Artist as Ethnographer,” through the lens of the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo's practice of collecting historical material. While Foster problematizes Western artists’ “primitivist fantasies” in the 1990s world of “postcolonial and “multinational capitalism,” I will consider Vo’ 21st century method of acquiring objects through auction sales, negotiations with their owners, and excavating them from their sites of origin, as reversing the roles of “self” and “other.” In purchasing White House memorabilia dated to the Vietnam-American war at auctions and salvaging antique statues from Vietnamese Catholic churches as artistic practice, Danh Vo illustrates what Hal Foster considered the problem of “othering” the self instead of “selving” the other. This essay will consider how Vo could present a case of alterity that returns the gaze and projects Vietnamese history back to the Western viewer. In her review of Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo's Guggenheim retrospective in February 2018, Roberta Smith hesitated to call the artist an artist Instead, she dubbed him, somewhat pejoratively, a “hunter gatherer” and called his collection of historical objects to be illustrative of the “usual fate of non-Western countries: the debilitating progression of missionaries, colonization, military occupation and economic exploitation.” The tone of her review is precisely the kind of attitude on the part of the contemporary art world that an artist such as Danh Vo, and others who have been marginalized from institutions such as the Guggenheim, have been fighting against Yet, Vo's very presence in a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim serves to disprove Smith's own “assumption of outsideness” (Foster, 1995: 304).

The criticisms I address in this article provoke questions about the very nature of aesthetic discourse and its relation to scientific approach in art theory. In the article, I try to respond to the author who criticizes me (and evolutionary aesthetics) for disliking avant-garde art and, worse, contemporary aesthetics. I also try to explain that I am not a biological determinist, that I do not consider art an evolutionary adaptation, that I do not practice reductionism, and that I know how evolutionary mechanisms work. I also describe the reasons why the contemporary aesthetics, which the critic represents, is afraid of being scientific, and what this has to do with the need for prestige and belonging to the art world.

A problem of perfection at art is analyzed in the article according to paradigm of the art market as a system of cultural, economic and social interactions of the art world. The author finds out the vitality of the artwork not only as its essential value but also defines the idea of its imaginary vitality. The latter is created by the art market participants, and it causes the commercial value of the artwork. The article makes an assumption about the division of art, at least of the Modern and Contemporary history, into two spheres — the art of “aesthetic experience” and the art of “commercial success”. While the art of “aesthetic experience” is aimed at finding and creating a new artistic language (the embodiment of new creative ideas, complex ethical and aesthetic problems), the art of “commercial success” follows artistic stereotypes, uses creative innovations in an adapted form, which is included in the cultural and aesthetic system familiar to the audience of art. This antithesis is analyzed in the article by the example of comparing a number of works by two artists of the same time. One is Mikhail Larionov, a prominent artist of the Russian Avant-Garde, and the other is Vladislav Izmailovitch, a typical representative of Salon and Late Academic art. Considering the specific historical aspects of vitality in art, the author analyzes several examples. Firstly, the late oeuvre of the Russian artist Ilya Repin as a metaphor for the “joy of the risen”. Secondly, the Easter rarities of the House of Faberge, which have changed their status over the past century from a home memorabilia to a cultural myth and became an object of the art market nowadays. Thirdly, the exposition of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2019, where authors and curators exploited the vitality of Dutch and Flemish art of the 17th century as the personification of contemporary creative pursuits.

Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day shifts the boundaries between representing and producing rituals. In 2003, the artist scripted a holiday for a freshly built, suburban-style neighborhood in New York State, which he simultaneously turned into a documentary film and quasi-liturgical participatory installation. Beyond the art world, innumerable new rituals are formalizing and circulating through videos online.

Abstract In this interview, Patricia White and Sarah Keller talk with Barbara Hammer's partner for over thirty years, Florrie Burke, who in multiple ways has helped keep Hammer's work present in the art world after her death in 2019. In the interview, Burke discusses life with Hammer and her drive to complete projects during the last years of her life. Outlining the variety of outlets for Hammer's work after her death, Burke describes her own role in ensuring the continuation of Hammer's legacy.

This thesis concerns Peter Tomory's nine years as Director of the Auckland City Art Gallery, between 1956 and 1964. The main theme that emerges in this study concerns the emphasis Tomory placed on professional practices, both at the Gallery and in the visual arts in New Zealand as a whole. The discussion is broken into four chapters. The first chapter sets the context for Tomory's directorship: his professional background, the New Zealand art world of the 1950s, and his initial vision for the Gallery. The second chapter is devoted to Tomory's development of the Gallery's permanent collection, and the third explores the ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions undertaken at the Gallery during his tenure. These broad topics are considered with reference to Tomory's policy statements, and through the close study of selected case studies. The final chapter examines the history of New Zealand art that Tomory developed over his twelve years in New Zealand (including both the texts he published while at the Gallery, and those he wrote while lecturing at the University of Auckland School of Fine Arts from 1965 to 1968) and his call for a more professional approach to art writing in this country. A bibliography of Tomory's published texts is included. A special effort is made in this study to consider Tomory's activities at the Gallery and his writing within their original historical and art-historical contexts, and also with reference to the way these actions and texts have been interpreted and employed by later commentators, especially post-nationalist critics. In this way, it is revealed that the history of New Zealand art formulated in the 1950s and 1960s was less homogenous, more complex and more contentious than it has more recently been portrayed.