They take their art seriously in Britain. The critic Johann Hari, who writes for the British daily The Independent, has done a no-holds-barred takedown of Jake and Dinos Chapman, aging YBA’s — that’s Young British Artists to you –and early Saatchi collection favorites, who have a major show at Tate Liverpool.
Hari’s point is chiefly …
I bundled up last night and made it to a preview of the upcoming show at the Museum of Modern Art devoted to Armando Reveron, a Venezuelan painter who died in 1954. It was odd weather for looking at work produced mostly in a Caribbean resort village. And for good measure it was almost all in wintry white. But I knew to expect that on …
As part of its 150th anniversary celebration, the American Institute of Architects released a poll this morning that purports to identify America’s 150 favorite works of American architecture. Being as list obsessed as any other red blooded American — actually, I said that just to get the word American into this paragraph some more — …
A number of papers have been reporting that Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has agreed to give a home to an unrealized Jeff Koons project — a replica of a 1940s locomotive that would hang nose down from a 161-foot tall crane. As Koons envisions it, every so often the thing will chug, turn its wheels and …
Over the freezing cold weekend I curled up with The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts by Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s largely a meditation on fiction, its meanings and methods, but some of what he says applies to the arts generally. That would describe his passage about why it would have been …
A reader offered a quick comment to my post about museums recombining work from their permanent collections. What he said, in its entirety, was: “Sounds like a trip to the Barnes Foundation is in your future…” Two responses from me:
1 – Weirdly, there is a trip to the Barnes in my future. I’m awaiting confirmation on a March 2 …
I’m surprised that none of the coverage of yesterday’s invasion of Boston by little light men, or at least none of the coverage that I’ve seen, mentions what looks plain to me — that the ad campaign that backfired was modeled after street art, meaning graffiti, wheat paste sheets, decals, etc. Ad shops that think of themselves as …
My last post asked why more museums don’t attempt the occasional illuminating mix of periods and media from their own collections. In no time my blogosphere colleague Tyler Green came up with a quick example of a museum that’s been doing that, the De Young in San Francisco. (You need to look into the first item on his list of Five …
Tell me again why most museums are so afraid to mix work from different styles and periods in their galleries? It’s not that I can’t appreciate the value of the standard chronological force march through art history, but I’m always struck by how rarely museums are willing to depart from that model, to put aside a gallery from time to …
In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing that Willem DeKooning had given him. Then he called the new work Erased DeKooning Drawing. Now I discover that graffiti artists in Brazil and the U.K. have found some new ways to erase their way into art history. Meanwhile they’ve been creating some pretty funny headaches for city officials …
I just caught up with What Remains, a documentary about the photographer Sally Mann that’s been playing around the festival circuit and will cablecast on Cinemax this Wednesday, Jan. 31 at 7 pm. Full disclosure, Cinemax is part of HBO, which is a subsidiary of Time Warner, which also owns Time and so on. (Look closely at your own …
Maybe it’s time to retire the idea of “outsider art”. That’s the catch all term for work produced by self-taught artists who may also be hermits, mental patients, religious obsessives and so on. As much as anything it’s been a marketing device, a word that hints of rebellion and feverish disorder. Artists are supposed to have that mad …
Like a lot of people I was badly disappointed by David Childs’ misbegotten design for the Freedom Tower, the battle clad banality that will stand where the World Trade Center used to be. And the massive flank of accompanying towers by major names — Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki — is not much better. Whatever their …
