Left Coast, North and South

Matthew Barney leaves his mark, Drawing Restraint, inside SFMOMA Follow up on an earlier post: Chloe Veltman has written a very good piece in the Times highlighting the two shows I reviewed here (Reporting on the Other Coast) currently on view at MOCA Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I am […]

A Week’s Worth of Responses to Smith’s “Post-Minimal to the Max”

Terry Winters, Freeunion (Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery) Winters was highlighted as one of Carol Diehl’s favorite “overlooked” artists. He’s on my list too. Over the week since Roberta Smith published her article, Post-Minimal to the Max in the Sunday Times (I wrote about it here) the floodgates opened. Do a search and you will find […]

Do Something Else Next

Adam, Eve, by Philip Taafe (Taafe is one of several undervalued painters mentioned in Roberta Smith’s Sunday Times piece) Roberta Smith secured the premier position in the Sunday Times Arts section, above the fold and in the center. The visual arts rarely show up in the top slot these days. Her article, Post-Minimal to the […]

God Gutters Down to Metaphor

Continuing on the theme of 19th century masters (an earlier post this week featured Paul Cézanne) here’s a poem by Irish poet Derek Mahon (whose work was featured previously here) about Vincent Van Gogh: A Portrait of the Artist (for Colin Middleton) Shivering in the darkness Of pits, slag-heaps, beetroot fields, I gasp for light […]

Cézanne: A Multiplicity of Successively Probed Sensations

Apples and Oranges, by Paul Cézanne (Photo: Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris) Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer sat for several years on my bookshelf (the one that is, unfortunately, gravitationally challenged and is sagging precariously) waiting for its chance to get cracked open. That finally happened during those luxurious, divinely isolated hours […]

Inner and Outer

The Crossing, video/sound installation by Bill Viola (Photo: Kira Perov) One of the added pleasures of the MOCA Los Angeles show (reference to this is in the blog below) was the quotes from artists that accompanied their works. Many are worth sharing and are compelling even without the specific context of the work on display. […]