The international festival of documentary film

Document.Art - The International Festival of Documentary Films

Location: Pitesti/Romania

Date: September 2013

Closing date: July 2013

Dedicated since its inception to tourism, the "Document. Art." Festival has enriched its sections, has displayed its openness for experimentation and innovation and has led to a favourable groundswell of genres. Any festival is, by its very purpose, a complex means of promoting both of the product of the film and the product represented by the host city. In short, all activities included in the programme of such an event have been and continue to be subsumed to insight. This year the 16th International Festival of Film on Art, Ecology and Tourism will be held in the city of Pitetsi.

Contact: Prof. Nicolae Luca

Address: Calea 13 Septembrie 123

bl. 129, ap. 8, sector 5

Bucuresti 050717, Romania

Phone: +40 (21) 410 31 68

Fax: +40 (21) 4103168

Email: festival@dokumentarts.ro

Website: www.dokumentarts.ro

In 1997, as staff art critic for an upstate New York newspaper, I went to a museum exhibition of works from the 1970s through the 1990s called "Is It Art?"—a coyly provocative question with the clear answer, Yes, whether you like it or not. The exhibit was an adjunct to a book (not the other way around) titled Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society, that sought to explain and endorse the work of thirty-seven of our age's most highly regarded artists, including Joseph Beuys, Sophie Calle, Gilbert and George, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Gerhard Richter. In the book, each artist was chosen for his or her explorations of a culturally relevant concept or theme; hence, the idea of "Data Collecting" was illustrated by the pixelated pointillism of painter Chuck Close; of "A Chicano Woman" with the icon-crowded installations of Amalia Mesa-Bains; of "Self-Sanctification" by the multiple videotaped plastic surgeries and phials of fat tissue of French artist Orlan; and so on in this manner. The subject "Urine" was personified by Andres Serrano, who in the early 1990s had been a lightning rod in the first "culture wars" for his photograph Piss Christ, which, with Robert Mapplethorpe's images of homosexual sadomasochistic sex, and the work of other politically, sexually, and religiously controversial artists, had been assailed by right-wing politicians in a scorched-earth campaign against contemporary art and government funding. For much of the '90s, detractors from Sen. Jesse Helms to the television journalist Morley Safer prosecuted a case against the very same aesthetic that "Is It Art?" was mounted to defend.

Although my job at the paper was to act somewhat as an expert, I was at the time largely self-taught, with limited exposure to the postmodern avant-garde or its controlling philosophy, expressed by Linda Weintraub, author-curator of the book-exhibit, as "deviation." Today,

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