Looking Around

Okay, I’m back to the blog. That last road trip kept me away one day longer than planned. In the interim the independent committee appointed by the Smithsonian to look into the management of its affairs under its former chief exec Lawrence Small, issued a report that pretty much wiped the floor with Small. You can find the full report …

Traveling today. Back to the blog tomorrow. But wanted to post a quick link to some news about yet another building on the Modernism Death Watch.

It’s a question that comes to mind all the time. Who among living artists will continue to be famous a century or so from now? Who will continue to seem important and powerful? The Barnes Foundation is full of Jules Pascins, once a name that every art lover knew. Now he’s one so obscure it wouldn’t be fair as a Trivial Pursuit …

Okay, I’m back from Venice. If you really need to read more abot the Biennale, here’s a link to my overview piece in the new issue of Time International. Now on to other subjects.

Here’s one. I had a chance recently to preview all eight episodes of The Power of Art, the Simon Schama documentary series that begins Monday night, June …

My stay in Venice is winding down. (After a week of running around this place, so am I.) For my last Biennale post, rather than offer final observations, I decided to talk again with an artist who has work showing here. Those are the people the Biennale is all about.

Christine Hill is an American, raised in Binghamton, N.Y., who has …

The Italian pavilion has a very funny video installation, called Democrazy, by Francesco Vezzoli, a satire of the American (and increasingly, the world’s) political campaign process. It consists of two sixty-second videos — parody presidential campaign spots — that play simultaneously on large screens facing one another in a …

The distinguished thing itself. Isn’t that what Henry James, on his death bed, called death? The distinguished thing is a motif of sorts at this Biennale. The U.S., of course, is represented by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres. (Though the pavilion doesn’t include his loveliest commentary on mortality, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), two …

Okay, I said I would get back to the Joseph Beuys/Matthew Barney compare-and-contrast exhibition at the Venice Guggenheim. A useful show, obviously. The line between them is as straight as a crooked line could be, and I haven’t seen this just-begging-to-be-mounted comparison mounted anywhere else.

In one room there are artifacts from …

I said a few days ago that I would return one last time to a description of the big international show at the Biennale organized by Rob Storr, “Think With the Senses/Feel With the Mind”. And walk with the feet. It’s a big, big show that begins at the Arsenale and concludes, 100 artists and a mile or so later, at the Giardini. As …

I stopped by the Venice Guggenheim, located in Peggy Guggenheim’s former palazzo, to see the joint Joseph Beuys/Matthew Barney show. (More on that later.) I got distracted by her permanent collection. Guggenheim moved to Venice in 1949, after the gradual disintegration of the community of emigre artists who had fled to New York during …

I’m not giving out the prizes here, but now having seen most of the official pavilions at the Biennale — and yes, I’ve been here for five days and yes, it takes that long and longer to do justice to this thing — the pan-African group show at the Arsenale is not to be missed. It represents Africans — defined to include Arab North …

At the Czech pavilion at the Giardini, you can have one of those experiences where the presentation gets badly in the way of the art. The artist is Irena Juzova. (Apologies, there are two accents in her last name, but as I’ve explained before, there are technical complications to doing accents over letters on this blog that would give …

Here’s a nice surprise. Some artists whose work never interested me before show up at the Biennale in a different light — and it’s the same work, more or less. The Russian pavilion features four individual artists and one collective, AES+F, which stands for Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes. …