LOS ANGELES — In kindergarten, we learned that sharing is caring, 1+1 is 2, and napping after lunch is a good thing. Most of those lessons from our youthful years still apply, except for that latter one.
This week, critics weigh in on the new Barnes Foundation museum in central Philadelphia … and in other non-Barnes-related links … discotecture, progressive architectural ideas and the voice of Rene Magritte.
How do adjacent drawings or photos affect our reading experience as readers? What happens in the mind as we process both words and images? How do both tell a story together?
If there is one constant about Thomas Nozkowski that I would single out, it is his lifelong insistence on subverting conventions. In 1974 he began painting on canvas board measuring 16 by 20 inches. (Let’s be clear here — Bill Jensen never painted on this small a surface because it had no historical precedence). He used an inexpensive, mass-produced product, the same kind that comes in “paint by number” kits and carries associations with “Sunday painters.” No wonder his defiance went largely unnoticed, particularly when the ’80s rolled around.
Dana Schutz, who is in her mid-30s, belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in an epoch where painting was routinely thought of as a dead practice. One couldn’t just be a painter, because doing so would be to enter a dusty domain crammed with empty signifiers. It would mean you were doing something that was obsolete (and reviled) — like speaking Latin to the drugstore cashier. The lines were pretty clear: dumb people became painters; smart people became conceptual artists who painted only when and if the subject called for it. This viewpoint might have started out as speculation, but now it’s a stupid and persistent prejudice.
If fairs like Frieze draw art and money into uncomfortably close proximity, all that does is state the obvious. To separate them — to pretend that the former can float free of the latter — might appear to be a clean, ethical stance, but that’s a misperception.
LOS ANGELES — North Korea has a new website. And as far as I can tell, it’s not a parody.
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) has just announced an exciting plan: it will offer two fellowships specifically for social media artists. Even more surprisingly, the endeavor is being made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lolcats stopped by the office today and asked the staff if they could write a review of a show. It was Friday and we thought … why not!?
Heard something too? Send your quotes with where you heard it to overheardintheartworld [at] hyperallergic [dot] com
