All posts tagged: Nicholas Baume

After Douglas Crimp Questionnaire Response: Nicholas Baume

Douglas Douglas’s loving friendship over the past 25 years has helped to shape the person I am today. In 1994 I was a junior curator at the newly established Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. We’d decided to program around the annual Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, which had become the most notable event on the city’s cultural calendar. I proposed that we present a keynote lecture and was charged with inviting an international luminary. Douglas represented the nexus of contemporary art and activism like nobody else – an epoch defining critic, curator, and writer who had brought to the AIDS crisis the full force of his moral courage, extraordinary intellect, and profound compassion. As a young man who’d lost some of my closest family and friends to the disease, which hit Sydney’s gay community hard, and as a curator inspired by the clarity and conceptual insight of his art writing, he was already a profoundly influential figure. Out of the blue, I wrote Douglas inviting him to lecture at the MCA. I didn’t …