About
New York-based writer, curator, art historian and theorist Joshua Decter discusses his new book, Art Is a Problem: Selected Criticism, Essays, Interviews and Curatorial Projects (1986-2012), (JRP|Ringier, 2014). In this new publication Decter examines art's paradoxical condition: art problematises, and is intrinsically a problem. From this standpoint, he analyses art's definitions, functions, ethical entanglements, societal aspirations, and cultural contradictions.
Joshua Decter has contributed to Artforum, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, The Exhibitionist, Mousse, and other international periodicals. He has curated exhibitions at institutions such as PS1 (now MoMA PS1), The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Apex Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Kunsthalle Vienna, and The Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Decter has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, The School of Visual Arts in New York, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, UCLA, and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. From 2007 to 2011, Decter was Director of the Master of Public Art Studies Program at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles, where he founded the new graduate program, M.A. Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere.
Decter is the co-author of a forthcoming 2014 book, Exhibition as Social Intervention: âCulture in Action' 1993, volume 3 of Afterall Books' Exhibition Histories series.
