Art
9 Thoughts on Funhouse Art, Now with Cat GIFs!
I originally considered writing in a standard review format, but Carsten Höller’s retrospective Decision, currently on view at London’s Hayward Gallery, is more amenable to the listicle form.
Cassie Packard
Art
Artists Explore the Many Sides of Our 21st-Century Selves
LONDON — “Looks” is a slippery word.
Art
An Artist Considers the Trauma of His Two Homelands
LONDON — “Nagorno” is a Russian word for “mountain,” while “Karabakh” is a word of Turkic and Persian origin meaning “black garden.” When joined by a hyphen, the two words denote the boiling point of the Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed enclave — one of post-Soviet Europe’s “frozen conflicts”
Art
The Singular Worlds of Artists' Personal Collections
LONDON — Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector, on view at London’s Barbican Centre, draws on the common desire to make sense of people through their objects.
Art
The Last Rooms Immigrants See Before Being Deported
LONDON — At the heart of artist, writer, and technologist James Bridle’s project is the notion that the images that we are not shown are just as carefully selected as the ones we are: in this day and age, visual concealment is tactical, not accidental.
Books
An Essay Collection Wanders Through Centuries of Cultural Curiosities
In his essay on Andy Warhol’s 1964 film “Empire,” writer, critic, and public intellectual Brian Dillon turns what many would consider an invitation to deeply nap into an invitation to deeply look.
Art
At London's National Gallery, Staffers Strike and Visitors Carry On
LONDON — On February 4 from 9 to 11 am the National Gallery of London witnessed the second episode in a five-day strike by museum staff and members of the Public and Commercial Services Union
Art
The Real-Life Applications of "Post-Internet" Art
LONDON — The best works on view in this seven-artist selection are "post-internet" experiments (sorry) that probe the ways in which the internet has reconfigured, and continues to reconfigure, such charged arenas as identity, surveillance, and labor.
Art
Performers Shower Tate Britain with Fake Pounds Over Oil Money Ties
LONDON — It’s 10am on the last Saturday of January, and Tate Britain is predictably sleepy. The museum has just opened its doors for the day, and a modest coterie of visitors treads lightly to preserve the morning hush.
Art
The Designs of Dissent
LONDON — Two inflatable cobblestones, outsized and dully metallic, hang from the ceiling. It’s implicit: these are material agents of anarchy, the airborne heralds of revolution.
Art
Epic Done Right: Anselm Kiefer in London
LONDON — Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective comes at an odd cultural moment.
Art
Martha Rosler Tackles the Problem of Representation
LONDON — In the ’70s, photographer (and videographer, and rigorous cultural critic, and possible genius) Martha Rosler brought a critical eye, politically and philosophically, to the medium’s seductive pretenses of objectivity.