I came of age as an artist living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Outside my Henry Street loft was a confluence of disparate cultures, each battling for turf in their own way. If you headed north, you ran into the remnants of the 19th century Jewish immigrants, and if you kept going you’d […]
Art World
This Ain’t No Hobby, Investment or a Career
I have a lot of artist friends who are dedicated, hardworking and optimistic about their work. But when it comes to the vicissitudes of the larger world, they are ass-dragging pessimists. And it is understandable, given an art world that lavishly (and to a certain extent, randomly) rewards a few practitioners but leaves the majority […]
The Wince Factor
The New York Times’ architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff captured it all in the title of his review: The Chanel Pavilion: Clear folly in lean times. Look how quickly everything in our lives has shifted. In just a matter of weeks, the vox populi has traded its old laissez-faire lens for a sharp edged one, one […]
- Aesthetics
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Gillian Jagger: In Between
Installation at Violet Ray Gallery One of the old lions of the art world, Gillian Jagger, got a high five from John Perreault’s Artopia this week. She IS amazing. Can an artist be too original, too ambitious? Gillian Jagger, in my book, is truly an original, one of the most original artists I have ever […]
- Art Making
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The Thinking Gaze
The Frieze Fair, the UK’s biggest art fair, is currently open in London. A lot of the coverage of this high profile event has focused on how the global financial crisis will impact high roller art sales. That’s not the channel I’m watching, but a recent article in the Guardian by Sarah Thorton had something […]
Meaning and Presence
I found an article in The Independent yesterday that I posted on my filter blog Slow Painting. It has dominated my thinking all day. In a singularly succinct manner, it captures a core set of issues that are at the center of my disaffection with a number of trends in contemporary art. These are some […]
The Schmooze Factor
One of my favorite bloggers is G, the genius behind Writer Reading. A few days ago she posted an extremely thought-provoking piece called Are Writers Ever Really Loners? that I have been mulling over ever since. She probes the often disruptive relationship between the “solitary” act of writing and the role of interacting with the […]
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Take Me There
The work of Hiroshi Sugimoto cannot be comprehended without having been experienced in the flesh. Every artist believes this about their work, but in some circumstances it goes beyond optimal and moves into the imperative. So it is with Sugimoto’s photographs. (I have included this reproduction as an indicator but not the thing itself.) The […]
Clearing the Decks
During a time when I am still sitting in the silence—in the thinking and feeling rather than the doing, making, manifesting—my thoughts have been drawn to examples of significant disruptions in the flow of artistic output. Not just my own, but others. Probably the standout example from the recent past that is pointed to most […]
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans’ paintings have an atmosphere all their own. They stand out whenever I have seen them on display, with that signatory diluted palette and the painterly, brushstroked surface. His content is usually identifiable and yet the paintings have a mystery to them that makes them feel more aligned to non-representational work. Although much younger […]