Low-Risk Aesthetics: Institutional Critique at MOCA Cleveland

During the introductory remarks for a panel on October 7 involving six of the artists in the show (Ashford, Tovar, Murillo, Issa, Tariku Shiferaw, and Mario García Torres), curator Andrea Hickey defined “poetics,” one of the terms in the portmanteau “poethical.” It’s “a literary theory that considers how different parts of a text coalesce to affect a reader,” Hickey explained. “I’ve taken that word and applied it to visual art, to think about form and composition in an artwork.” (In other words, she’s interested in aesthetics.) But she neglected, in either her remarks or her catalog essay, to define the second member of the neologism: “ethical.”

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