Biographical information

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Carrie Lambert-Beatty is an art historian with a focus on contemporary art and interests in spectatorship, art and knowledge, and performance in an expanded sense. She teaches at Harvard University.

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Carrie Lambert-Beatty is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her research and teaching stress the connections that make seemingly obscure contemporary art a source for new thinking (and feeling) about pressing social problems.

An art historian with a focus on post-modern and contemporary art, she is currently at work on an art history of the post-truth turn.  Developing ideas from her essay “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility," this project explores what she termed parafiction--the presentation of fiction as fact—as a prevalent mode of contemporary art. During the extended crises in knowledge spurred by globalization, the internet, post-colonial reckoning, and climate change, artists repurposed the operations of performance, istallation, and conceptual art to generate a type of contemporary trompe-l'oeil; an art of epistemic adventure that presses viewers--often uncomfortably--into new values, habits, and competencies of knowing. Belonging niether to the classical ideal of rationality nor the post-truth model of partisanship-based belief, these are components of a progressive, contemporary epistemic set: curiosity, reflexivity, humility, and the ability to be surprised.

Lambert-Beatty came to the topic of parafiction through research on the potential and limits of political art in contemporary practice, which she explored in essays on hybrids of art and activism, such as Women on Waves and The Yes Men, and in the work of artists such as Tania Bruguera and Allora + Calzadilla. Her essay on recuperation--both neurological and ideological--accompanied the latter's representation of the United States at the 2011 Venice Biennial. Her 2008 book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (MIT Press) treated aesthetic issues such as minimalism, dance, documentation, and the problem of politics in the art of a signal member of the American avant-garde, bringing performance theory and dance history to the question of how artists responded, often at unconscious levels, to the burgeoning media culture of the 1960s. Lambert-Beatty’s writing has also appeared in collections such as the Blackwell-Wiley volume Contemporary Art 1989 to the Present, exhibition catalogs including Dance/Draw and A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, and the journals Artforum, Art Journal, Art Papers, and Signs, as well as October, of which she is an editor.

Before taking her current position at Harvard, Lambert-Beatty taught art history at Northwestern University. She studied American and Modern/Contemporary art history at Stanford University, receiving her Ph.D. in 2002, and was a Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program in 1997-98. Fellowships from the Luce/ACLS and Dedaelus Foundations, the Getty and Radcliffe Research Institutes, and the Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Studies have supported her research.