The culture mill grinds slowly in rural Pennsylvania. The visit of a “known” artist or critic is an event of some significance—at least to those people who care about and follow the less popular arts. The art-world figures who leave New York for the hinterlands usually do so to deliver a state-of-the-arts address at a college or arts organization. This was the case with Donald B. Kuspit’s visit in February, when he presented the second annual Weiner Lecture in the Fine Arts at Dickinson College in Carlisle.
Dickinson College is the very model of the small, distinguished, liberal-arts college. It has a pedigree (as one of the oldest colleges in the country), a charming campus set in a picturesque town, and a reputation for a commitment to the liberal arts and scholarship in an age of rampant careerism and academic doubt.
Donald Kuspit is a professor of art history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a contributing editor of Art in America. He was the 1983 recipient of the College Art Association’s Mather Award for distinction in art criticism, and he writes frequently about contemporary art. His topic at Dickinson was “The Status of the Self in Recent Art.”
Professor Kuspit began by telling us how beautiful he found Carlisle and the Dickinson campus, and then launched right into an explanation of his critical assumptions. The first point was that his topic had to be understood in a postmodern context.
