I asked David Levine (our September artist) if I could publish this essay, which he wrote for Art/US (no. 13, June, 2006). He responded:
Let’s just stress that it was written in 2006, at a different moment, when different things were going on and different players mattered. The overall discourse has become a little more sophisticated since then, which perhaps restricts the claims I make, but I still believe in my analysis, and I still buy the defense of virtuosity, and the insistence on accounting for institutional conventions/aesthetics that are still overlooked, so yeah—let’s go.
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http://theperformanceclub.inversetheater.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/BAD-ART-v5.pdf
David Levine’s performance work has been seen at MoMA, Documenta XII, Mass MoCA, PS122, the Watermill Center, Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin), Blum and Poe (Los Angeles), Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (New York), and the Crossing the Line Festival. He has directed theater at Primary Stages, the Atlantic, the Sundance Theater Lab and the Vineyard. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Believer, Artforum, and Theater. He is a 2012-13 Radcliffe Fellow in Visual Arts, and Professor of Art at Bard College/European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, where he is the Director of the Studio Program.