Dean of Yale University School of Art.
Robert Storr is a writer, artist, art critic and member of the Art Council of the International Foundation for Art Research.
“Today what the artists do is so varied and wide spread out, that it is really futile to be focused, like in the past, on “major artistic trends”. Considering art, as I do, like a wide estuary composed of numerous branches, with different depths and rates of flow, leads to the conclusion that we can not just follow the largest and the fastest branches. We also have to explore the narrowest and the slowest, the deepest, or those which move in a myterious and surprising direction. As there is many ways to map out such a space, but no way to browse it as a whole, my strategy has been to try to follow a stream after an other, in order to give an overview of the entire landscape, while focusing my attention on certains areas. I simply can not admit the idea of the existence of a mainstream art. Today the important and influential art is created everywhere, as it is the case for a long time. It is less and less necessary for the artists to live in the artistic ghettos of one or another of the most active cities. The avant-garde is not a style or a brand, it is an attitude which is deliberately assumed by a certain fringe of artists and art critics.”
Experience
- Dean of Yale University School of Art, since 2006.
- First American Director of the Venice Bienial, 2007.
- Director of the 52th International Art Exhibition, Think with the Senses — Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense, 2007.
- Named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2002.
- Chief curator of paintings and sculptures department in the Museum of Modern Art of New York, from 1990 to 2002.
Selected publications
- In direzione ostinata e contraria: scritti sull’arte contemporanea, 2011.
- September: A History Painting by Gerhardt Richter, 2009.
- Gerhardt Richter: the Cage Paintings, 2009.