Matthew Barney (Photo: Private collection, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels) The Cremaster by Matthew Barney, a five part film cycle, was shown repeatedly during a retrospective of Barney’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in 2003. I drove down from Boston three times to see it and dragged my friends, […]
Holland Cotter
From a High Small Place
Self Portrait with Masks, James Ensor It is easy for someone like me, who has been studying art for a lifetime, to convince myself that I have an accurate measure of the dimensions of a particular artist’s operative domain. But gratefully that conceit has not resulted in a callow disregard, and I love when my […]
Wood and Water
Ganesha, festooned with the dried flowers of a Hawaiian lei, in my studio Holland Cotter wrote a piece over the weekend in the New York Times on the state of the art world, The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art! This article was not unlike about 20 others on the same topic that I’ve […]
Boho-Luxing the Lower East Side
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 […]
Palm Leaf Painting
(detail) One of the most beguiling things I found while in India was palm leaf “books,” made from thin strips of dried palm leaves and threaded together to fold up accordion-style. Copies of this ancient tradition have been made into tourist souvenirs, but the early versions that we saw in museum collections are stunning. We […]