Rebekah Modrak’s chapter “Best Made Re Made: Critical Interventions in the Online Marketplace” has just been published in the book The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design, a collection of new essays edited by Myra Thiessen and Chris Brisbin, faculty at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia.

The book aims to investigate Critique, Criticality, and Criticism from an inter- or multi-disciplinary perspective. With contributions from a multi-disciplinary authorship from nine countries – the UK, USA, Australia, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium, and Denmark – this edited volume provides a wide range of leading perspectives evaluating the landscape of criticality and how it is being shaped by technological and social advances.

Modrak’s invited and peer-reviewed contribution is within the book’s Part 4, a section reflecting on the various new ways that media influences and provides a platform for criticism and criticality and exploring the role of new media in influencing the relationship between opinion, lay critique, and traditional forms of professional expert criticism.

Her chapter examines consumptive practices and un-critical consumerism by analyzing the dual Best Made/Re Made marketing campaigns and proposing that critical artistic interventions can enact critique through strategies of parafiction and parody. The Re Made Co. artwork responds to Best Made as brand and also to the news and cultural media that can appear critical while simultaneously promulgating brand messaging, including art and design institutions that commodify, rather than critique, luxury design items like those sold by Best Made.

The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design has been reviewed by James Elkins of the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, who writes: “This is an exceptionally carefully assembled book. Criticism inhabits this book in Protean fashion: as a profession, an historical artifact, a philosophic position, a hope, a form of experimental writing, a family of theories, a material practice, and above all as conversation and a sense of community.”

The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design | Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

Rebekah Modrak presented at the Anywhere & Elsewhere Biennial Conference, a two-day conference on November 15th and 16th at Parsons School of Design, supported as part of a partnership between Parsons Fine Arts (Parsons School of Design, The New School) and the Centre of Visual Art (University of Melbourne).

Modrak co-presented with her collaborator, curator Marialaura Ghidini, as part of the WHERE⇄ABOUT panel moderated by Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum. Their presentation described their online curatorial project #exstrange, which generated a collection of artworks to be encountered, auction-style, by the users of one the largest marketplaces on the web, eBay. During this live exhibition project, parasitic to the commercial platform, over a hundred artists and 12 curators infiltrated eBay throughout 88 sequential days in early 2017 — spanning the inauguration of the 45th United States president, the Women’s March, and North Korean’s tests of a ballistic missile.

The Anywhere & Elsewhere Biennial Conference featured presentations from artists that successfully navigated blind peer evaluation as part of Project Anywhere’s Global Exhibition Program (2017-2018), together with invited presentations from established artists, designers, scholars, curators and writers actively engaged with practices outside traditional circuits. The conference recognized the practices of an increasing number of artists and creative practitioners working across spaces, places and temporalities well-beyond the limits of established exhibition formats. This two-day conference explored questions associated with presenting, experiencing, discussing and evaluating art located anywhere and elsewhere in space and time.