Roger Kimball, Managing Editor of The New Criterion and author of The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, has published a jeremiad about the state of the art world. It’s not that he’s saying anything that hasn’t been said by others, but the piece is a concise outline of the […]
Art World
Leaving it in the Unknown
Deliberately low-keyed art often resembles ruins, like neolithic rather than classical monuments, amalgams of past and future, remains of something “more,” vestiges of some unknown venture. The ghost of content continues to hover over the most obdurately abstract art. The more open, or ambiguous, the experience offered, the more the viewer is forced to depend […]
Painful Beauty
Chris Jordan’s photographic works are extremely memorable. He knows how to create retinal appeal to be sure, but he also packs a political wallop. Some of you may know of his photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, published earlier this year. Circuit boards Another […]
Venice Redux
The New York Times’ website has a clip from Michael Kimmelman who is reporting on the Venice Biennale. He talks about feeling bored by the work at first, but the longer time he spent looking the more he liked what he saw. I was moved by his account of the Gonzalez-Torres installation: Mr. Storr [commissioner […]
Taiga in Philadelphia
All you Philadelphians (and those of you passing through town anytime between now and July 22 of this year): Terrific, terrific show of brush paintings by Ike Taiga and his wife, Tokuyama Gyokuran, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is the first time their work has been featured in the United States, and once […]
Hype-Proof
Serra installation in the Sculpture Garden at MOMA For all the hype around the Richard Serra show at MOMA, I was still in awe, pure awe. There’s no way to not be, these works are insanely beautiful, massive, haunting, playful, and unforgettable. Seeing these with your inner child in full command is my best recommendation. […]
Indra’s Net at 88th and Fifth
Alyson Shotz, The Shape of Space, 2004. Cut plastic Fresnel lens sheets and staples. Highlight from a recent visit to the Guggenheim Museum: In the lobby, the first thing you see is a beguiling wall of light which turns out to be Fresnel lenses stapled together. I sat with and walked around this curtain of […]
Schjeldahl on “Global Feminisms” Show
Ingrid Mwangi (Kenya), Static Drift, 2001 While some may not be as enamored and delighted by Peter Schjeldahl’s art reportage as I usually am, here’s a passage full of ideas from his latest review of the “Global Feminisms” show at the Brooklyn Museum from the New Yorker. Of particular interest to me is his handling […]
Contexts: The Museum vs The Gallery
Howard Morphy is a leading authority on Aboriginal art and the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at The Australian National University. In his article, Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery, he explores a number of issues that I have been writing and thinking about. Here is one idea excerpt: The theory of a […]
Real Estate, and Context
In a sense art has been a space race at least since the onset of Cubism, which shattered the calm of one-point perspective and, with collage, punctured the barrier between art and reality. Art’s spaces really started multiplying in the 1960s, with the successive splinterings of Fluxus, Happenings, Pop, Minimalism, Arte Povera and Neo-Concrete and […]