Overview

 In 2003 the editorial board of the Chicago-based journal Critical Inquiry in 2003 asked invited participants a series of questions as part of their symposium "Critical Inquiry in the 21st Century". Question 1: It has been suggested that the great era of theory is now behind us and that we have entered a period of timidity, backfilling, and (at best) empirical accumulation. True?

Pronouncements of the irrelevance and consequential demise of critical and cultural theory are now commonplace. Re-Framing Art: The Conditions of Theory brings together a group of artists, writers and theorists to address the question of whether we really are now living 'after theory'? What is it we are talking about when we cite 'theory'? Is it now simply shorthand for irrelevant intellectual pursuit displaced by the hegemony of market and cultural individualism salved by new claims to humanism? How did theory become the pejorative of thought? Why the divides between theory and practice, theory and direct action, theory and life? Can it be true that the new urgencies of the 'age of terror' preclude critical reflection? What are the implications of the shift in modus operandi of art writing in Australia from critical exegesis to PR copy? Or of the emphasis upon 'professional practice' modules rather than critical theory within art colleges?

Speakers include: Nicole Anderson, David Brooks, Gordon Bull, Blair French, Alex Gawronski, Adam Geczy, Elspeth Probyn, Cameron Tonkinwise, Ruth Watson