Art-ON-Museums Seminar: Towards End of Art

A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) on which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.(Dickie, 1971. Aesthetics,)

"Art- On- Museums Seminar" was completed and organized by Division of Culture and Creativity (DCC) on 5 May 2021. The seminar aims to exchange up-to-date discourse and museum practices in the field of contemporary art, especially focusing on the art geography from Alternative-Well Established-New-Branded museums. "ON" seems to be a common word in most contemporary art literacy such as Lucian Freud's Thoughts "ON" Painting (1954), Sol Lewitt's Paragraphs "ON" Conceptual Art Susan Sontag's "ON" Photography (1977), Damien Hirst's "ON" the Way to Work (2001), Walter de Maria's "ON" the Importance of Natural Disasters (2018), etc. Indeed contemporary art now is "ON" Crisis that Gillick and Charlesworth critically comment on their thought Is This the End of Contemporary Art as We Know It? (ArtReview, 2020).

Three UIC Alumni (Lynn, Jacey, and Vera) and Hermione from GDMoA shared their experiences and extended trajectories to UIC students and staff. The definitions of art have been mutually argued in-between art as objects or artworld since the emergence of the New Institutional Theory of Art (Dickie, 1974). Danto also reveals how contemporary aesthetics has been re-defined by institutions and communities that make up 'the artworld' - that art institutions such as museums and galleries, and specific agents working within them, have the power to dictate what is art and what is not (Oxford Reference, 2021).

The seminar finally develops a platform for contemporary insights from the museum practitioners/ curators, and further forecasts the New Moves on Museum in the future development. By exploring and nourishing the Zhuhai-China cultural image, ideology and creativity, the seminar provides a new vison for a better museum "eco-system". Referring to Postmodernism - "Towards End of Art", physical and virtual borders of our institutions and museums are becoming vague and weak, such as the possibility of blurring the definite borders among orders, categories, stereotypes or preconceived notions of museum culture.