Dr. Aaron Rosen – Learning to Draw Badly: Guston’s Lessons for Contemporary Art

Speaking to a group of art students in 1978, Philip Guston mused: ‘Doesn’t anyone want to paint badly?’ It has become too easy to bemoan the quality of contemporary drawing and painting.  The more interesting challenge, as Guston understood so well in his last years, is not so much how to make good art, whatever that means, but how to make bad art – the right way. In this lecture, we’ll explore how Guston came to this conclusion, and what lessons his insights might have for contemporary artists. Dr. Aaron Rosen is the Lecturer in Sacred Traditions & the Arts at King’s College London. He taught previously at Yale, Oxford, and Columbia Universities, after receiving his PhD from the University of Cambridge and serving as a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley. He has lectured at universities and museums across the world, and has written widely for scholarly and popular publications, including The Observer, The Guardian and The Los Angeles Times. He is the author of Imagining Jewish Art (Legenda, 2009) and Art and Religion in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson, 2015). He is also the co-author of the children’s book, Where’s Your Creativity? (Tate, forthcoming 2017).  Dr. Rosen also curates exhibitions, including a series of shows at the Jewish Museum in London (2015) and Stations of the Cross, in venues across London including the National Gallery and St. Paul’s Cathedral (2016).