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Alexander Alberro

Alexander Alberro is Virginia Bloedel Wright '51 Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College. He is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2000), and coeditor (with Blake Stimson) of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (2000), both published by the MIT Press.

Titles by This Author

Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity

By Alexander Alberro

Conceptual art was one of the most influential art movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In this book Alexander Alberro traces its origins to the mid-1960s, when its principles were first articulated by the artists Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and others. One of Alberro's central arguments is that the conceptual art movement was founded not just by the artists but also by the dealer Seth Siegelaub.

Titles by This Editor

Institutional Critique

An Anthology of Artists' Writings
Edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson

"Institutional critique" is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own place within galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when--driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art--institutional critique emerged as a genre.

Museum Highlights

The Writings of Andrea Fraser
By Andrea Fraser
Edited by Alexander Alberro

Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to "trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself." It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique—as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men’s room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings.

Art After Conceptual Art

Edited by Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann

Art After Conceptual Art tracks the various legacies of conceptualist practice over the past three decades. The anthology introduces and develops the idea that Conceptual art generated several different, and even contradictory, forms of art practice. Whereas some of these art modes contested commonplace assumptions of what art is, others served to buttress those beliefs.

Conceptual Art

A Critical Anthology
Edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson

Compared to other avant-garde movements that emerged in the 1960s, conceptual art has received relatively little serious attention from art historians and critics of the past twenty-five years. This landmark anthology collects for the first time the key historical documents that helped give definition and purpose to the movement. It also contains more recent memoirs by participants, as well as critical histories of the period by some of today's leading artists and art historians.

Two-Way Mirror Power

Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art
By Dan Graham
Edited by Alexander Alberro

introduction by Jeff Wall

The internationally renowned artist Dan Graham is widely acknowledged as one of the leading members of the 1960s conceptual art movement. However, his subsequent work in photography, performance, film, video, and the fusion of art and architecture, though well known in Europe and Japan, is less well known in English-speaking countries.