Patricia Briggs

Who Cares, essays by Anne Pasternak and Doug Ashford
New York: Creative Time, Inc. 2006

Although it is a good introduction to socially engaged art since the 1980s, Who Cares is focused on the present. Do artists really care about social engagement anymore? This little book is a record of three informal conversations over dinner on this topic. Simply flip through this book and walk away with the names of significant contemporary artists and projects. If you’re already grounded in this area, you will probably enjoy and learn something from the participant’s discussion of commercialization and the Chelsea gallery system, public art projects and city branding campaigns, the status of the visual in spectacle-saturated society, funding political art in the wake of the Patriot Act, and the problem of teaching activist art. Skip Doug Ashford’s over-written introduction and dig right into the conversations which sometimes erupt into intergenerational squabbling.

[[ An Associate Professor in the Liberal Arts Department, Patricia
Briggs has been teaching art history and contemporary criticism at MCAD since 1999. An art historian, critic, and independent curator, Briggs has published reviews and essays in journals such as History of Photography, Artforum International, and Public Art Review and has curated exhibitions at the Weisman Art Museum, Plains Art Museum, and MCAD Gallery. Briggs received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1998.]]