Diedrich Diederichsen

Diedrich Diederichsen, Professor at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, participated in our TALK Series. Diederichsen‘s talk entitled “When Did Contemporaneity Start? The Problems of a Degree Zero and the case of 1960” took place in the Reykjavik Art Museum.

“Is contemporaneity merely a relational category or is there/was there an epoch that could be called „Contemporary Art“, which started at one point and will be over soon. Or is it already over, as some people argue?”

In the talk, Diederichsen discussed the question of contemporaneity in relation to the general philosophical problem of measuring and deciding about historical starting points. More specifically, he looked at the year 1960 as one possible candidate for a starting point of contemporary art.

Diedrich Diederichsen (b. 1957, Hamburg) is an author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is one of Germany′s most prolific intellectual writers, and writes continuously on pop-music, contemporary art, modern composition, cinema, theater, design and politics.

Diederichsen worked as a journalist and editor/publisher of influential music journals Sounds and Spex in the 1980‘s. Since the early 90‘s he has been a visiting professor in Stuttgart, Pasadena, Offenbach am Main, Munich, Cologne, Los Angeles and Gainesville to name but a few. From 1998 to 2007 he was Professor for Aesthetic Theory & Cultural Studies at Merz-Akademie, Stuttgart. Since 2006, Diederichsen has been Professor for Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Institute for Art History & Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Art, Vienna.

Diederichsen has contributed to numerous magazines, dailies and journals in the German speaking world as well as Artscribe, Artforum, and Frieze. Recent books include: Über Pop-Musik (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2014); The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2013) and The Sopranos (Zürich: diaphanes-booklet 2012).

Diedrich Diederichsen lives in Berlin and Vienna.

Under the title TALK Series, Reykjavík Art Museum, Icelandic Art Center and the Iceland Academy of the Arts initiated a collaborative visitor program in 2012, offering a platform for continual professional-, international encounters to take place in Iceland. Comprising visits by leading figures in the visual arts, this program initiative brings to the Icelandic art community, as well as to the public at large, the burgeoning ideas and diverse practices that define the terms and shape the dialogue within the contemporary international art scene.