Steven Henry Madoff
Steven Henry Madoff is Chair, MA in Curatorial Practice, the School of Visual Arts, New York. He is an award-winning writer, editor, and poet; a contributing editor to Modern Painters and ARTnews; and a former art critic at Time magazine. His most recent book is Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), published by MIT Press. His most recent exhibition as guest curator, Host & Guest, took place earlier this year at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. This November he hosts an international conference, Curating the Curatorial, at SVA.
When my sister died, I was holding her hand in a hospital room in Hartford. Amid the shock of it, what I felt was the inevitability of this destruction that seemed, whatever else it was (the many other things it was), to be a monument to sheer facticity: the unswerving immenseness of the thing itself.
