Contemporary Art Writing Quarterly

As so many of us are still unable to visit art in person, you and I are inundated with digital material from many sources, filling our inboxes and feeds with thousands of decontextualized works by hundreds of artists. "Platforms" and "Viewing Rooms" and "Documentation." In case you’d like to spend a while absorbed in anything other than listless documentation of art, you might like to visit Contemporary Art Writing Quarterly, where we publish deeper, uh, "expanses" on art. Pick your essay below

Yellowing Conceptual Art*

Choose your own Intestinal Adventure

The Violence Against Faces*

The Model*

Modern Gothic

CAWD on Fetish (Featured on CAD!)

Tony Conrad's Glass

*Rough Draft

Past: ektor garcia at Cooper Cole

"...a very modern problem, our world, mediated by screens, the totality of which becomes enshrined in gallery or touch screen glass, and art is the world's development project in all the ways to surmount it, a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, that we could actually feel something through glass. A "supernormal stimulus," exaggerated materiality that begins to look like fetish for."


Read full: ektor garcia at Cooper Cole

AR: Guan Xiao at Antenna Space

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Originally Posted: June 12th, 2020

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Past: Nancy Lupo

"Like eye goo, stuff's service is its waste, a continual sloughing, so we can remain fresh, clean. Stuff accumulates, piles, is shed. Stuff is quasi things, is transient, transactional. A disposable fork is, like, quintessential stuff.."


Read full: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

AR: Maren Hassinger at Tiwani Contemporary

Click here to read

Originally Posted: November 5th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Past: J. Parker Valentine

"expectations of legibility, depictive of some tip-of-the-tongue subject within a library of means detailing the amorphous thing it circles but fails to produce. There is the lure of subject object, the thing that will at any moment manifest itself in the definitive lines of drawing"

"a viewer left to sort spaghetti formed lines like tea leaves that were inside you all along. Pareidolia."


J. Parker Valentine at Misako & Rosen, J. Parker Valentine at Juan and Patricia Vergez Collection, J. Parker Valentine at Park View

August Review 2020

Today we initiate our sixth annual August Review. Every year we reflect on the exhibitions that were especially memorable to us since the previous August. We will re-publish one show each day, marked by “AR:” in the title, while continuing to cover new exhibitions daily.

At the end of the month we will provide an “August Review Index.” The previous five seasons’ selections are available here: 2015, 2016, 2017 2018, and 2019.