A newly edited and updated version of Craig Owens’ 1984 interview with Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield has been published by Badlands Unlimited.

Join Lynne Tillman, Thomas Beard, and Horsfield for CRAIG OWENS—PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CRITIC, a book launch and panel discussion with Paul Chan and Johanna Burton at the New Museum.

Owens (1950–1990) was an associate editor at October and a senior editor at Art in America. His essays are collected in Beyond Recognition—Representation, Power, and Culture (1994).

In his memoir Before Pictures, Douglas Crimp describes the quality of Owen’s “unrestrained intellectual enthusiasm.”:

“In many of our late-night phone calls… [Owens] would say something like, ‘I’m writing a brilliant essay on…’—on whatever it was he was working on at the moment. I was at first taken aback by his apparent immodesty, but I grew to understand and appreciate his elation at the process of his own thinking, sparked by his voracious reading.” — Douglas Crimp*

CRAIG OWENS—PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CRITIC

Launch and panel

Friday, March 2, at 7 pm.

New Museum

235 Bowery, New York City.

* Douglas Crimp, “Agon,” in Before Pictures (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes Press/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 213.

From top: Craig Owens, 1982, from the series Art World, photograph © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Craig Owens photographed by Barbara Kruger in her loft, 1988, image credit New Museum.