Award News - College Art Association Awards

The College Art Association (CAA) recently announced the recipients of its 2009 Awards for Distinction. These annual awards (according to the CAA website) “honor outstanding member achievements and reaffirm CAA’s mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, and teaching in the visual arts”. Several MIT Press authors received awards this year.

One of this year’s award recipients is Boris Groys, who will receive the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism for his work in Art Power.

The CAA writes of Boris Groys:

“The work of Boris Groys maintains and extends the tradition of art criticism as provocation. His essays in Art Power posit his arguments as stylish paradoxes that dismantle contemporary art and modernism, their presentation in public venues such as museums, and the role of curatorship and criticism within this framework. Groys consistently questions established and fashionable art-world notions but acknowledges and even honors the continued significance of utopian ideals in our construction of modernity.”

Another familiar MIT Press author is winning the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art – Georges Didi-Huberman, author of The Invention of Hysteria.

”One of the most distinctive and influential voices in the field of art history, Georges Didi-Huberman has written a cascade of publications that address works of art created in a variety of geographical locations and widely differing historical moments. His work constitutes a call for the recognition of the poetry of images and their continuing appeal to interpretation, while nevertheless perpetually escaping its grasp. Among his important books are the pioneering The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (1982, translated to English in 2003); Confronting Images (a 2005 translation of Devant l’image of 1990), Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1995; from a French edition of 1990); L’Image survivante (2002); and Images Malgré Tout (2003), translated as Images in Spite of All (2008)."

 And finally, an essay from the upcoming MIT Press book from Richard Meyer has received the Art Journal Award. The essay is titled "Artists sometimes have feelings".

”The Art Journal Award is presented to Richard Meyer for his insightful, rich, and personal essay,"Artists sometimes have feelings”, published in the Winter 2008 issue as part of a larger forum focused on working with living artists. Grounding his exegesis in the Fogg Art Museum director Edward Forbes’s 1911 account of the beauties and pitfalls of working with living artists, Meyer gives an unusual measure of historical depth to his work and the issue’s topic, making clear that the “problem of the living artist” is indeed not new. Using the interview as a subject—he writes about his experiences talking with Paul McCarthy and Anita Steckel—Meyer explores how personal feelings structure work on contemporary art, and how those feelings, even in their capacity to hinder and thwart communication, construct useful boundaries and limitations.”

 Congratulations to all.