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jens hoffmann

I Went To The Jewish Museum’s “Take Me (I’m Yours)” And All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt

by Emily Colucci on December 7, 2016
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A loud, tacky sign emblazoned with “Everything Must Go” would not feel out of place in the Jewish Museum’s current exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours). A rack of plastic goodie bags branded with the exhibition’s title hang in the show’s entrance, encouraging viewers to fill up on artist-made pins, T-shirts, used clothing, candy and a 25-cent ball of air from Yoko Ono. With this free-for-all curatorial style, the exhibit looks more like a display of samples than a contemporary art show.

That’s a bad thing. The whole show feels like a gimmick designed to lure people in the door by offering them free swag. Meanwhile, the Museum is presenting the idea that they are challenging the traditional relationship between art and its viewers, which not only isn’t true (it’s been done to death), it distracts from the sociopolitical critiques made by many of the artists in the show. Simply put, the show is a disaster.

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Rijksmuseum takes White-Out to Art History

by Rea McNamara on December 10, 2015
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Has the trigger warning phenomenon hit institutional curation?

The New York Times reported today on an ongoing project at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to have their history department curators remove “racially-charged terms” from the titles and even descriptions of artworks in their collection’s online catalog.

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Recommended From Detroit: The People’s Biennial

by Robin Dluzen on November 5, 2014
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At the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s “People’s Biennial,” curators Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann have selected a group of established artists to, in turn, choose their own non-art world collaborators. But “outsider art” hardly begins to cover the kinds of creative practices on display.

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The Jewish Museum Got a Time Machine: First Visitor, Sigmund Freud

by Corinna Kirsch on October 30, 2013
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Looks like someone gave The Jewish Museum keys to a time machine. Come this winter, the museum’s public programs will include speakers such as the very dead Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and Albert Einstein.

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