Read this: “The Museum of Modern Art’s Artist Network Diagram and the Culture of Capitalism”

“Inventing Abstraction, Reinventing Our Selves: The Museum of Modern Art’s Artist Network Diagram and the Culture of Capitalism,”
by Nicole E. Reiner and Jonathan Patkowski

If the studio and the workshop are the places where artworks and new ways of thinking and seeing most often take shape, exhibitions are the sites where such creations meet the public and, in the course of their reception, make, and re-make, art history.

Inventing Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art (December 23, 2012-April 15, 2013), which critics praised as offering a fresh, inclusive and cross-disciplinary perspective on the origins of artistic abstraction, is one such exhibition summoning the full potential of this form of object-based historiography.1 Alongside modernist titans like Picasso and Mondrian, the exhibition spotlighted comparatively unfamiliar figures and many women artists. Curator Leah Dickerman further stressed the transmedial reach of abstraction beyond the traditional domains of painting and sculpture by foregrounding abstract photography, music, dance and poetry, paralleling MoMA’s own disciplinary re-orientation beyond painting and sculpture over the preceding decade……..

Rutgers Art Review (11pp, a .pdf version is available)