The newest episode of Bad at Sports, a podcast about contemporary art, is an interview with Jim Elkins about this past summer’s Stone Summer Theory Institute.  Elkins, professor at the School of the Art Institute in Art History, Theory and Criticism and also in Visual and Critical Studies (my department), organizes the Theory Institute, a yearly conference that seeks to bring together theorists, critics, students, and etc to have conversations, every summer for the past 4 years.

I participated in this year’s seminar: Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-aesthetic, so listening to his interview is an interesting re-cap and experience for me.  This summer’s conference explored the tension between the modernist idea of the aesthetic and the postmodern notion of the anti-aesthetic, a term coined by Hal Foster for his edited volume The Anti-Aesthetic written and edited in 1983 that has influenced many artists working since the 80s and today.

The interview is an interesting discussion of what happened at the seminar, contemporary art practices, and the possibilities of what’s to come.  Also, to give myself some credit, Elkins discusses the youtube videos that I suggested we watch during one of the seminars: Double Rainbow and the parody Doublicious…

To listen to the podcast, click here to visit the Bad At Sports site to download it.