The Project and The (ART) Object: Conversations with Ješa Denegri and Benjamin Buchloh

Abstract This article explores the books of interviews, published in 2024, with the prominent German-American art critic Benjamin Buchloh and his Yugoslavian peer Jerko “Ješa” Denegri. In Exit Interview, Buchloh is interviewed by his colleague and friend Hal Foster; and in The Yugoslav Art Space, Denegri engages in a dialogue with Branislav Dimitrijević and Jelena Vesić, the art critics that came of age during the unraveling of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. While the first book engages in a retrospective view of Buchloh's career as an art critic, the second one attempts, in Vesić's words, to establish a dialogical method of art-historical writing. The interviews with two art critics approach the same time period and a similar set of artists, artistic phenomena, and movements from two radically different geo-political perspectives: one central (New York and capitalist), and the other peripheral (Belgrade and socialist). Ultimately, the books offer two different visions about the present and future of art criticism.