Ann Hamilton, human carriage What an extraordinary day spent in Manhattan at the Guggenheim and the Met. I’ll parse the joy one show at a time. “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860-1989” is curator Alexandra Munroe’s brave revision of the influences that affected the complexity and richness of the American art tradition. Raised […]
Art
Pulitzer’s Ideal (Dis-)Placements
Sometimes a shout out is needed. Here’s a link to a show at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts website that came to my attention by way of Tyler Green’s excellent blog, Modern Art Notes: Ideal (Dis-)Placements Here’s what Green wrote: Small, independent museums can do things big museums can’t (or don’t). They can take […]
Art Lovers Of a Different Stripe
Herb and Dorothy Vogel, art collectors extraordinaire, at home The April 2009 issue of Modern Painters magazine has an interview by Christopher Turner with documentarist Megumi Sasaki about her new film, Herb and Dorothy. The story of Herb and Dorothy Vogel is so outrageous and runs so against the grain of everything I have known […]
- Aesthetics
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Beauty is the Hero
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Kate Moss modelling for Topshop were cited as contrasting ideals of beauty in a debate on whether or Britain has become indifferent to beauty. Photograph: Corbis/AFP Beauty. A topic that never goes away. I’ve written about it many times on this blog, quoting from some of my favorite books in […]
Roni Horn: Redolent, Bright, Sinister, Sexual
Roni Horn is a wonder. She is one of that select group of “large arc” artists whose works are epic and full scaled and yet they still feel personal, intimate and emotionally alive. The ironic stance and political positioning that walls off a lot of contemporary installation art for me is not present in her […]
That’s Him
The newly identified portrait of William Shakespeare has been unveiled at Dartmouth House, Mayfair, London Photo: Geoff Pugh THE BARD! From the Guardian: The oil canvas is thought to have been painted in 1610 – six years before the playwright’s death – when he was about 46 years old. It remained in the same family […]
Go Broad, or Go Deep
What a treasure trove is Robert Ayers’ blog, A Sky filled with Shooting Stars. Earlier this week I posted a few extracts from Ayers’ recent interview with Larry Poons. Digging a bit deeper into Ayers’ archives, I have found fascinating interviews with several other significant artists. It is now clear to me that Ayers has […]
Poons, Letting it Rip
A recent interview with the Zen koan-like and enigmatic artist Larry Poons can be read in its entirety on Robert Ayers’ excellent blog, A sky filled with Shooting Stars. Poons has a show of new work up in Chelsea, and it is quite a departure from earlier “dot” paintings. Larry Poons Here is a sample […]
- Aesthetics
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In Search of the Unified Field
Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Picasso I mentioned a book a few posts ago that I wanted to talk about in more depth. David Galenson’s Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a very useful “map” through the historical survey of the visual arts. Galenson is an economist, not an art historian, but his passion for art runs […]
Fairied
This morning a group of us went to see the Shepard Fairey retrospective at the ICA in Boston. Having lived through the viral spread of Andre the Giant and the OBEY stickers and stencils in Boston and Providence, I had a preconceived idea about what it would be like to see his work assembled in […]