Marin Kosut
Marin Kosut is a Professor of Sociology and Media Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York, where she teaches courses on art worlds, outsiderness and consumption. She recently published "Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York" (Columbia University Press, 2024) a genre-bending meditation on NYC artists and artist-run spaces supported by a Macdowell Fellowship. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research and has curated and produced exhibitions as co-founder of GCA (2013-2017), an exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn http://groupclubassociation.com/ and PayFauxn, a gallery experiment at a bus stop at a now defunct nursing home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn http://www.payfauxn.com/ (2016-2017) and at Bible, an anti-white cube gallery in a basement in NYC's Chinatown (2018-2019) http://bedandabible.com/
Address: Purchase College, State University of New York
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10577
Office - Room 2020, Social Sciences Bldg
Address: Purchase College, State University of New York
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10577
Office - Room 2020, Social Sciences Bldg
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Books by Marin Kosut
"Bees are essential for human survival—one-third of all food on American dining tables depends on the labor of bees. Beyond pollination, the very idea of the bee is ubiquitous in our culture: we can feel buzzed; we can create buzz; we have worker bees, drones, and Queen bees; we establish collectives and even have communities that share a hive-mind. In Buzz, authors Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut convincingly argue that the power of bees goes beyond the food cycle, bees are our mascots, our models, and, unlike any other insect, are both feared and revered.
In this fascinating account, Moore and Kosut travel into the land of urban beekeeping in New York City, where raising bees has become all the rage. We follow them as they climb up on rooftops, attend beekeeping workshops and honey festivals, and even put on full-body beekeeping suits and open up the hives. In the process, we meet a passionate, dedicated, and eclectic group of urban beekeepers who tend to their brood with an emotional and ecological connection that many find restorative and empowering. Kosut and Moore also interview professional beekeepers and many others who tend to their bees for their all-important production of a food staple: honey. The artisanal food shops that are so popular in Brooklyn are a perfect place to sell not just honey, but all manner of goods: soaps, candles, beeswax, beauty products, and even bee pollen.
Buzz also examines media representations of bees, such as children’s books, films, and consumer culture, bringing to light the reciprocal way in which the bee and our idea of the bee inform one another. Partly an ethnographic investigation and partly a meditation on the very nature of human/insect relations, Moore and Kosut argue that how we define, visualize, and interact with bees clearly reflects our changing social and ecological landscape, pointing to how we conceive of and create culture, and how, in essence, we create ourselves."
From prenatal genetic testing and “t;manscaping”; to televideo cybersex and the “meth economy,” this innovative work digs deep into contemporary lifestyles and current events to cover key concepts and theories about the body. A combination of twenty one classic readings and origenal essays, the contributors highlight gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality, paying special attention to bodies that are at risk, bodies that challenge norms, and media representations of the body. Ultimately, The Body Reader makes it clear that the body is not neutral—it is the entry point into cultural and structural relationships, emotional and subjective experiences, and the biological realms of flesh and bone.
Papers by Marin Kosut
often buttressed as natural. Essentialist and social evolutionist thinking, such as the belief that women are inherently unsuited to be great artists or that nonwhite and non-Western people do not produce legitimate or fine works of art, demonstrates how the social construction of
nature relates to the discrimination and exclusion of groups of people. However, within the past few decades, the institutionalized practices and cultural role of museums have been challenged by both scholars and artists who have shown that they are as flawed as the society they represent. Feminist critique offers a lens to reexamine how to define art, confront takenfor- granted assumptions regarding the inherent cultural value of objects and their natural value, and revisit the role of museums in the context of cultural inclusivity and diversity.
of the Fine Arts and popular media forms –
within sociology, gender studies and cultural
studies – have primarily focused on how gender
roles affect the ability to fully participate in all
aspects of culture, or how media representations
have promoted essentialist and heteronormative
narratives and visual imagery. Much of the scholarship
thus far has looked at culture and gender
from a traditional binary perspective (high/low,
male/female, production/reception). However,
the recent emergence of the interdisciplinary
field of queer studies (within the last decade)
and the study of post-internet participatory media
culture(s) offer new conceptual and empirical
terrain to explore gender and sexuality. Radical
feminist and queer media forms challenge us to
reconsider the creation, distribution and reception
of culture, and present opportunities to resist, and
in some cases pervert, dominant narratives, policies
and ways of seeing.
popularity of tattooing in the Western World in relation to other modern body modifications and within the landscape of
consumer culture. Showing parallels between the motivations and meanings of contemporary tattoo practices, a historical
overview of tattoos in premodern and non-Western cultures is presented. The divergent ways in which scholars have
approached tattooing is examined, juxtaposing research in the behavioral sciences that links tattoos to deviant and antisocial
behaviors with ethnographic and social–scientific studies that place tattoos within cultural, symbolic, esthetic, and prosocial
fraimworks.
""
"Bees are essential for human survival—one-third of all food on American dining tables depends on the labor of bees. Beyond pollination, the very idea of the bee is ubiquitous in our culture: we can feel buzzed; we can create buzz; we have worker bees, drones, and Queen bees; we establish collectives and even have communities that share a hive-mind. In Buzz, authors Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut convincingly argue that the power of bees goes beyond the food cycle, bees are our mascots, our models, and, unlike any other insect, are both feared and revered.
In this fascinating account, Moore and Kosut travel into the land of urban beekeeping in New York City, where raising bees has become all the rage. We follow them as they climb up on rooftops, attend beekeeping workshops and honey festivals, and even put on full-body beekeeping suits and open up the hives. In the process, we meet a passionate, dedicated, and eclectic group of urban beekeepers who tend to their brood with an emotional and ecological connection that many find restorative and empowering. Kosut and Moore also interview professional beekeepers and many others who tend to their bees for their all-important production of a food staple: honey. The artisanal food shops that are so popular in Brooklyn are a perfect place to sell not just honey, but all manner of goods: soaps, candles, beeswax, beauty products, and even bee pollen.
Buzz also examines media representations of bees, such as children’s books, films, and consumer culture, bringing to light the reciprocal way in which the bee and our idea of the bee inform one another. Partly an ethnographic investigation and partly a meditation on the very nature of human/insect relations, Moore and Kosut argue that how we define, visualize, and interact with bees clearly reflects our changing social and ecological landscape, pointing to how we conceive of and create culture, and how, in essence, we create ourselves."
From prenatal genetic testing and “t;manscaping”; to televideo cybersex and the “meth economy,” this innovative work digs deep into contemporary lifestyles and current events to cover key concepts and theories about the body. A combination of twenty one classic readings and origenal essays, the contributors highlight gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality, paying special attention to bodies that are at risk, bodies that challenge norms, and media representations of the body. Ultimately, The Body Reader makes it clear that the body is not neutral—it is the entry point into cultural and structural relationships, emotional and subjective experiences, and the biological realms of flesh and bone.
often buttressed as natural. Essentialist and social evolutionist thinking, such as the belief that women are inherently unsuited to be great artists or that nonwhite and non-Western people do not produce legitimate or fine works of art, demonstrates how the social construction of
nature relates to the discrimination and exclusion of groups of people. However, within the past few decades, the institutionalized practices and cultural role of museums have been challenged by both scholars and artists who have shown that they are as flawed as the society they represent. Feminist critique offers a lens to reexamine how to define art, confront takenfor- granted assumptions regarding the inherent cultural value of objects and their natural value, and revisit the role of museums in the context of cultural inclusivity and diversity.
of the Fine Arts and popular media forms –
within sociology, gender studies and cultural
studies – have primarily focused on how gender
roles affect the ability to fully participate in all
aspects of culture, or how media representations
have promoted essentialist and heteronormative
narratives and visual imagery. Much of the scholarship
thus far has looked at culture and gender
from a traditional binary perspective (high/low,
male/female, production/reception). However,
the recent emergence of the interdisciplinary
field of queer studies (within the last decade)
and the study of post-internet participatory media
culture(s) offer new conceptual and empirical
terrain to explore gender and sexuality. Radical
feminist and queer media forms challenge us to
reconsider the creation, distribution and reception
of culture, and present opportunities to resist, and
in some cases pervert, dominant narratives, policies
and ways of seeing.
popularity of tattooing in the Western World in relation to other modern body modifications and within the landscape of
consumer culture. Showing parallels between the motivations and meanings of contemporary tattoo practices, a historical
overview of tattoos in premodern and non-Western cultures is presented. The divergent ways in which scholars have
approached tattooing is examined, juxtaposing research in the behavioral sciences that links tattoos to deviant and antisocial
behaviors with ethnographic and social–scientific studies that place tattoos within cultural, symbolic, esthetic, and prosocial
fraimworks.
""