WIGA 2011
For the second annual What Is Good Art Competition, artists were asked to meditate on the “sublime” and the “beautiful,” two ideas rooted in aesthetic philosophy. Must art harness the sublime—that sense of discomfort when faced with ideas beyond our comprehension—to convey an ethical message? Can we find beauty in the gruesome?
A distinguished panel of judges, made up of experts from both art and ethics-related disciplines at Duke and beyond, awarded $500, $300, and $100 to the first, second, and third place winners, respectively. During the opening gala on April 11, attendees voted for a fourth Gallery Choice prize as well.
The What is Good Art? Exhibition was open Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm, April 11 through May 15, 2011.
Panel of Judges:
Christopher Bass, Vice President at Oak Hill Capital Partners, L.P.
William Fick, Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Visual Arts
Margaret Mertz, Director, The Kenan Institute for the Arts
Noah Pickus, Director, The Kenan Institute for Ethics
Kimerly Rorschach, Director, Nasher Museum of Art
Suzanne Shanahan, Associate Director, The Kenan Institute for Ethics
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chauncey Stillman Professor in Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics
Charles Thompson, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Center for Documentary Studies
The winners of the second annual What is Good Art? Competition were:
Sarah Goetz, “Intermittence” (1st place)
Marissa Bergmann, “Inverse Uni*verse” (2nd place)
Abigail Bucher, “Seal, It’s What’s for Dinner” (3rd place)
Chelsea Pieroni, “Manifest SMOKE” (Gallery Choice)
Below, read the full 2011 exhibition statement:
See the rest of the 2011 What Is Good Art? Exhibition below.
Keshav Mahendru, The Postmaster's Daughter
This was a photograph I took while warming up for a posed portrait of my great grandmother. It captures the brief interstice of transition between who my great grandmother is and the persona she wants the photograph to preserve for posterity. This desire to control how we are perceived seems to be the motivation behind almost every action we undertake – a posed photograph captures this very literally. She motioned for me to stop. It was as if I had violated her privacy by taking her picture before she had the chance to sit down in the chair fold her arms and put on a smile and look dignified.
I often see life as a series of choices which result from the constant tug of war between the person we know we are and the person we think we ought to be. Whether it is choosing our major in college or updating our Facebook status, this tension plays out.
How ought we live? I don’t know. In the ideal world one would assume that the best course of action is to shed all pretense and be who we really are but in reality these personas that we project are almost second nature to us and are not easily distinguishable from the real us. There isn’t a neat line separating these identities.
At the same time I questioned my own personal code of ethics as to whether it was ethical of me to capture something she didn’t want the world to see.
For more information, contact Christian Ferney.