"Inanimate Life," the show's title, is a good term for art.
Social practice is a relatively new term for art that puts less emphasis on objects made for individual contemplation and more energy into projects involving participation, activism or community organizing.
Since the early 1960's, Westermann has been best known for sleek, usually solid wood sculptures that extended and Americanized Surrealism, presaged Pop and Conceptual art and are among the ultimate examples of "specific objects," Donald Judd's admiring term for art that rejects both painting and traditional sculpture.
The proper term for art history, therefore, is propaganda.
If such an institution seems a contradiction in terms for an art form that, by definition, is supposed to take place on the street, curator Nailya Allahverdiyeva seems to be its biggest opponent.
Crowd-sourcing and cognitive surplus are two terms of art for the changing power dynamic between those at the top that are ignorant and corrupt, and those across the bottom that are attentive and ethical.
Even so, the early moderns seem to have inherited a strong sense of the value of various forms of emotional tranquility – something worth bearing in mind for understanding the changing uses of 'passion.' Every philosopher of the early modern period developed distinctive terms of art for discussing the emotions.
If this is "idea art" (another term for conceptual art in the 1960s), tell me: what is the idea it embodies?
"The French term for it, art brut, means raw art: the theory was you get cooked by culture but somehow these artists have managed to be outside it," he tells me.
After much to and fro, the City Council and the Giuliani administration worked out a comprehensive plan for new "street furniture," the term of art for public toilets, bus-stop shelters, newsstands and the like.
