New Year Quiz

1) I-spy round. Score one point for each exhibition you saw in 2007 that featured one of the following:
a) Imagery of former Eastern Bloc leisure facilities.
b) Pencil drawings of attractive ‘70s terrorists / political activists / post-punks.
c) An archive of stern-looking independent publications, presented in an artist-designed book shelf-cum-conversation pit.
d) Vaguely disquieting paintings of forests. (Score one extra point for every background figure dressed like a saltimbanque, Ruritanian naval officer or minor theosophist).
e) Sculpture that’s kinda Minimalist but kinda Emo too so it’s, like, a fucked-up, tearstained altar to NOW!
f) Newsprint and a silken arc of semen.
g) A horse. A beautiful, terrified horse.

2) The highlight of the 2007 exhibition season was:
a) A major museum retrospective. Something like Louise Borgeois at Tate Modern, or Richard Serra at MoMA.
b) A stylish artist-curated project, perhaps Ugo Rondinone’s ‘The Third Mind’ at the Palais de Tokyo.
c) A screening of films by an obscure Quebecois artist / activist collective that disbanded in the early 1980s, held in a Friedrichshain squat.
d) ‘Warhol vs. Banksy’.

3) 2007 was all about:
a) The politics of aesthetics.
b) The aesthetics of politics.
c) Spaziergangswissenschaften.
d) The Benjamins.

4) 2008 will be about:
a) Walter Benjamin.
b) Floella Benjamin.
c) Pope Benjamin II of Alexandria.
d) Binyamin Netanyahu.

5) Money is:
a) Beautiful.
b) A consensus reality.
c) Too tight to mention.
d) A performance-enhancing drug.

4) Art fairs, of course, are the new biennales. Demonstrate the veracity of the following statements (remember to show your workings):
a) Euros are the new dollars.
b) Participation is the new social sculpture.
c) India is the new China.
d) New Guinea is the new Guinea.

5) Facial hair is a must for aspiring artists. Will be 2008’s key style be:
a) The ‘Gustave Courbet’.
b) The ‘John Baldessari’.
c) The ‘Guerrilla Girl’.
d) The ‘Anwar Sadat’.

6) Statements of curatorial intent – we all love them. But which of the following is the title of a forthcoming biennial / triennial, and which is a song by popular 1990s jazz-funk band Jamiroquai?
a) ‘Time Crevasse’
b) ‘Stillness in Time’
c) ‘Made Up’
d) ‘Traveling Without Moving’
e) ‘Wonder’
f) ‘Destitute Illusions’
g) ‘Colors and Olympism’
h) ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’

7) Anagram round! Rearrange the following phrases to spell the names of leading contemporary artists:
a) Myth Beaten Raw
b) Demeans Murals
c) Race Enmity
d) Lethal Corners
e) Clumsy Aunt
f) Epochal Lies
g) Oh Genitals

8) Essay round. Discuss one of the following propositions:
a) Criticism is dead. (Answer with reference to ‘only reading frieze for the ads’.)
b) ‘Praxis’ is just a fancy word for ‘practice’.
c) Institutional critique is management consultancy on the cheap.
d) Islands in the stream. That is what we are.

9) The next documenta should be curated by:
a) An artist
b) An art thief
c) An art consultant
d) Al and Tipper Gore

10) Tiebreak round (continue on an extra sheet of paper if necessary).
a) Is Modernity our Antiquity?
b) What is bare life?
c) What, when we really get right down to it, is to be done?