Douglas Crimp and Lynne Cooke on "Before Pictures"

Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with Douglas Crimp, art historian, critic, and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and professor of visual and cultural studies, University of Rochester. Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic who profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the “Pictures Generation”—a name Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, little is known about Crimp’s own formative experiences before the Pictures Generation. On January 8, 2017, Douglas Crimp joined Lynne Cooke to discuss the publication of Before Pictures. Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s.