Starting from the premise that contemporary art production, when it manages to reach the market, is actually art intended for pleasure of the one buying it, the aim of the lecture Art for Pleasure and Its Discontents is to get a critical insight into this phenomenon. In different media – from drawing through photography and video, the artistic objects presented here wish to demonstrate the complexity and ambivalence of the contemporary status of art and artist himself/herself. The fact that New York production is being presented in a city which – with much resistance and efforts – has only been forming the artistic market would be an opportunity to consider artistic phenomena that do not indulge to the vulgar logics of demand but are certainly relevant in institutional sense – they exist within the New York world of art. Particularly interesting seem to be the methods of problematization of existence of art for pleasure and all discontents resulting from that pleasure – in those who cannot or do not want to consume the art. This lecture is actually an attempt to suggest that one can find pleasure in art even when it is not treated like consumers’ goods.

Јована Стокић - biography

Art historian and critic Jovana Stokić lives currently and works in New York, preparing her doctoral theses "The Body Beautiful: Feminine Self-Representations, 1970-2000", which points to diverse methods that women artists use for trifling with the contemporary standard of woman’s beauty.

Selected projects

• 2005 – Curator of the exhibition "Beauty Matters", Tima Kim Fine Art Gallery, New York
• 2006 – Curator of the exhibition "New York as an Open Market, Individual in a Global Spectacle", Gallery Remont and O3ONE, Belgrade
• 2007 – Curator of the exhibition "Off Center Femininities – Regards from Serbia and Montenegro", Windows of Kimmel Center for University Life, New York University, New York.