Interview Excerpt

Clifford Owens: Absolutely. Young artists have no sense of history.

Nick Stillman: Why, Cliff not enough teaching?

Clifford Owens: (laughter) Not enough good teaching, perhaps. But I’m not sure it even comes through academia. Something else is happening right now with younger artists and their sense of history. It’s as if what preceded them is of no value or never really happened. I am always amazed when I talk to women artists in college who have no interest in feminist art. There seems to be this frightening, alarming return to the modernist notion of the self contained, genius originator. Young artists in particular don’t want to acknowledge antecedents. I’m not really interested in recuperating history and I’m certainly not interested in romantic nostalgia for the past, but I’m very aware of the history. I mean, painters are always painting against the history of painting. Performance art seems so new, but there’s been so much development in the past 40 or 50 years.

BOMB Magazine | Number 117/ Fall 2011