12th November 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What does it mean to practice art criticism after Gaza? This presentation considers how the genocide-ecocide in Gaza has extended into an assault on art\u2019s critical capacities, including through institutional and state censorship and counterinsurgency. Yet repression never achieves totality: criticism persists through refusal, displacement, reinvention, and collective resistance. I ask what forms such criticism might take amid the collapse of the political and juridical frameworks that once authorized claims to justice. I develop this question through three interconnected challenges. First, the infrastructural turn asks how the economic, institutional, ideological, and technological systems in which art operates have become mechanisms for organizing contemporary power. Second, \u201cthe society of the psy-op\u201d draws attention to surveillance, disinformation, and behavioral manipulation increasingly embedded in media and social life. Third, fascist AI, names the dangers of automated governance and the displacement of human judgment, raising urgent questions about thought under technological dehumanization. These challenges demand a criticism that is situated, oppositional, and materially engaged\u2014one capable of confronting institutional contradictions, building experimental collectives, practicing mutual aid, and imagining forms of survival amid unprecedented violence, democratic breakdown, and existential threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
T. J. Demos <\/strong>is\u00a0a Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor in the VIAD Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate both at NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities at Universit\u00e0 Ca’ Foscari Venezia (Fall 2026) and at Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin (2026-2027). Demos\u00a0writes about contemporary art, social movement aesthetics, global politics, and political ecology, and is the author of numerous books,\u00a0including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today\u00a0<\/em>(Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology\u00a0<\/em>(Sternberg Press, 2016);\u00a0and\u00a0The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis <\/em>(Duke University Press, 2013); and\u00a0Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come<\/em>\u00a0(Sternberg Press, 2023). He is currently finishing a new book for MIT Press, provisionally titled:\u00a0Art After Justice: Contemporary Art, Environmental Violence, and the Post-Liberal Turn.<\/em> T.J. Demos Criticism after Gaza 12th November 2026 What does it mean to practice art criticism after Gaza? This presentation considers how the genocide-ecocide in Gaza has extended into an assault on art\u2019s critical capacities, including through institutional and state censorship and counterinsurgency. Yet repression never achieves totality: criticism persists through refusal, displacement, reinvention, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seminars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":885,"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions\/885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bildhauereiundraumstrategien.akbild.ac.at\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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