Julian Stallabrass

Julian Stallabrass is a British art historian, photographer and curator. He was educated at Leighton Park School and New College, Oxford University where he studied PPE. A Marxist, he has written extensively on contemporary art (including internet art), photography and the history of twentieth century British art.

Life and work

Stallabrass is a Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

He is on the editorial boards of Art History and the New Left Review.

He curated the exhibition "Art and Money Online" at Tate Britain, London in 2001. In 2008 he selected the Brighton Photo Biennial and from the catalogue of which he edited the book Memory of Fire:Images of War and The War of Images (2013)

Stallabrass was highly critical of the Young British Artists movement, and their works and influence was the subject of his 1999 study High Art Lite, a term he coined as a disparaging synonym to the pervasive YBA acronym:

"As the art market revived [in the early- to mid- 1990s] and success beckoned, the new art became more evidently two-faced, looking still to the mass media and a broad audience but also to the particular concerns of the narrow world of art-buyers and dealers. To please both was not an easy task. Could the artists face both ways at once, and take both sets of viewers seriously? That split in attention, I shall argue, led to a wide public being successfully courted but not seriously addressed. It has left a large audience for high art lite intrigued but unsatisfied, puzzled at the work's meaning and wanting explanations that are never vouchsafed: the aim of this book is to suggest the direction some of those answers might take and to do so in a style that is as accessible as the art it examines."

Publications

Publications by Stallabrass

• Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture. London: Verso, 1996. ISBN 978-1859840368.
• High Art Lite
  • High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. London: Verso, 1999. ISBN 9781859843185.
  • High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. London: Verso, 2001. ISBN 978-1859843185.
  • High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (Revised and Expanded edition). London: Verso, 2006. ISBN 978-1844670857.
• Paris Pictured (2002).
• Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce (2003).
• Art Incorporated (2004), republished as Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (2006).
• Memory of Fire:Images of War and The War of Images (2013).
• Documentary. Documents of Contemporary Art series. London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. ISBN 9780262518291. Edited by Stallabrass, with contributions by James Agee, Ariella Azoulay, Walter Benjamin, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, John Grierson, David Levi Strauss, Elizabeth McCausland, Carl Plantinga, Jacques Rancière, Martha Rosler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allan Sekula, W. Eugene Smith, Susan Sontag, Hito Steyerl and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Publications with contributions by Stallabrass

• Everything was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2012. ISBN 9780946372393. Edited by Kate Bush and Gerry Badger. Stallabrass contributes an essay ("Rather a hawk?: the photography of Larry Burrows"), as do Bush ("Everything was moving"), Badger ("Spirit of the times, spirit of place: a view of photography in the 1960s and 1970s"), Gavin Jantjes ("Ernest Cole"), Sean O'Hagan ("The unreal everyday: William Eggleston's America" and "Against detachment: Bruce Davidson's photographs of America during the Civil Rights Era"), Tanya Barson ("Graciela Iturbide: a matter of complicity"), T.J. Demos ("On Sigmar Polke's Der Bärenkampf"), Helen Petrovsky ("Boris Mikhailov: towards a new universality"), Boris Mikhailov ("Yesterday's sandwich"), Ian Jeffrey ("Shomei Tomatsu"), Robert Pledge ("Li Zhensheng: the cinematographer behind the photographer"), Manthia Diawara ("The sixties in Bamako: Malick Sidibé and James Brown"), Shanay Jhaveri ("Raghubir Singh and the geographical culture of India"), and Raghubir Singh ("River of colour: an Indian view"). Photographs by David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, William Eggleston, Bruce Davidson, Graciela Iturbide, Sigmar Polke, Boris Mikhailov, Sidibé, Shomei Tomatsu, Larry Burrows, Li Zhensheng, and Raghubir Singh. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Everything was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, curated by Kate Bush, September 2012-January 2013 at Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, London.

External links

• Courtauld Institute of Art Dr Julian Stallabrass
• Stewart Home, Review of High Art Lite (Verso, 2nd edition 2006)
• More than 100 essays and articles by Stallabrass online.