“I probably can’t persuade you to drop everything, including 300 or so bucks on transportation, and spend an afternoon in Pittsburgh, but maybe I can make you feel bad about not doing so,” critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote back in 1988, reviewing the Carnegie International, the grand survey of contemporary art founded back in 1896 by Andrew Carnegie that used to run every three years and now comes about every five.
Sadly, the next edition is still more than a year away, but its curators (Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski) and curatorial assistants (Amanda Donnan and Jen Lue) have been maintaining a blog for the past few months, and it provides a rather wonderful look at the show and their goings-on—and there’s no $300 outlay required to view it. (Thank you to Frieze‘s Twitter for pointing to the site this morning.)
The contributors started back in September with a brief history of the exhibition that includes a choice selection of pictures from previous exhibitions, including the members of the 1955 jury hard at work discussing the art and writing their scores on a blackboard. Since then, the blog has reported from a symposium on building art institutions in Africa from Dakar, covered pizza parties/art talks in Steel City and discussed a recently discovered box of letters from artist James Lee Byars to the Carnegie’s director back in the mid 1960s.
Exciting stuff. Take a look here.
