Debra Bricker Balken: Harold Rosenberg and "The Herd of Independent Minds"

Monday, November 17, 6PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Penthouse Room 901
"Harold Rosenberg and 'The Herd of Independent Minds' "

 

 

In the past few years, Balken has been struck by the pervasiveness of one of Harold Rosenberg's signature terms, "The Herd of Independent Minds," in both the press and on social media. The title of a key essay written in 1948, the phrase was an indictment of what Rosenberg perceived as a new conformity that had settled into postwar intellectual culture. This conformity had resulted, Rosenberg thought, in the sameness and homogeneity, even banality, of much writing on art and literature. How did Rosenberg land on this term?  Just as importantly, how did it shape his aesthetic thought and subsequent role as one of the foremost art critics of his generation? Additionally, why has this term been revived and floated at this juncture in history, and what are the implications of its current usage and meanings?    

 

 

Debra Bricker Balken is an award-winning independent scholar, writer, and curator who works on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Recipient of an Inaugural Clark Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute, a Senior Fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, she brought out Harold Rosenberg, A Critic’s Life for the University of Chicago Press in fall 2021 with additional grants from the Getty Research Institute and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts/Art Writers Grant.

Balken’s many exhibitions have travelled to venues both domestically and internationally, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection/Venice, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Princeton Art Museum, among others. In addition, she has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues on modern and contemporary subjects.