The upcoming Forum of Essays on Art will host, following a proposition from Jacques Serrano who conceived the event, a first “competition of ideas” on the theme of: “rethinking the social and economic conditions of art * ”

Part I: Discoveries

Too often I have come across instances where critics have used ahistorical and acontextual claims in critiquing works by artists who like myself, do not come from the centers of power in the art world. This happens often through ignorance but more often than not, through intellectual sloppiness. When work does not fit into the context that the critic is used to addressing, it can lead to a type of contextual dissonance where the artist's work is imploded into the writer's narrow, subjective assumptions.

R. Streitmatter-Tran (b. 1972, Bien Hoa, Vietnam) is an artist living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He received his degree in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.