some notes on HistoriCITY from Yeung Yang (part3)

Now, the specific questions.
The first three questions relate to issues that I noticed being raised but not further discussed:
Art works as pure objects versus art works being “texts” to be read – there was noticeably interests on both sides. In-between positions could have been mentioned, too, like Appadurai’s “art today is trash tomorrow”[Appadurai, Arjun, “The Thing Itself” in Public Culture, V.18:1, 2006, Duke University Press], which highlights the material and symbolic conditions art is always already embedded in.

The relation between history and memory:
one speaker specifically pointed to the meaning of the project of history making for herself as an individual - the need to be “connected to the past”. The affective dimension of history and memory is also well taken. But what was at stake seemed not just to be about who could remember by choice, but where that happens. The question becomes how the “a wholesale preoccupation with the individual psychology of remembering”[Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History” in Representations, Spring 1989, V.26:15.] relate to history writing as a social and public duty?

If the Roundtable made a mark in Hong Kong art history, what kind of social world had it built around itself? I am thinking how the moderator and some speakers dropped in names into their presentations and speeches. Some were names of authority announcing the speakers’ intellectual affinity; others announced affective ties; some, for reasons explained, hence more apparent than others. My questions are, when do these acts of names dropping expand the discussion and when do they become acts of closure that exclude others not familiar with those names? If art worlds are partly manifested in these names, what kinds of art worlds are encouraged and what others are excluded?