What comes after postmodernism is less interesting than the changed nature of the art system and art writing.
Author Archives: David Carrier
David Carrier is a philosopher who writes art criticism. His Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art and Lawrence Carroll (Bloomsbury) and with Joachim Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins/ The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (Penn State University Press) were published in 2018. He is writing a book about the historic center of Naples, and with Pissarro he conducted a sequence of interviews with museum directors for Brooklyn Rail.
Posted inArt
The Work of Art in the Age of the Internet
How will the internet transform the way that contemporary visual art is created?
Posted inArt
When Philosophy and Art Intersect
Maria Bussmann’s elusive drawings acknowledge the impossibility of fixing philosophical terms in imagery, like bugs in amber.
Posted inArt
The Quality of Mercy, From Caravaggio to Conceptual Art
Like art, morality persists despite dramatic cultural transformations.
Posted inArt
When a Square Is Not Just a Square
Like his best works, Sean Scully’s “Black Square” is oddly exhilarating, especially because it is initially grim.
Posted inArt
When Disaster Can’t Be Pictured
To represent the world is to understand it, and to understand it might, hopefully, help cope with a plague.
Posted inBooks
A Close, Dazzling Look at Michelangelo’s Painting
Leo Steinberg’s compelling essays pull you into the interpretative process, asking you to see the drama he unpacks.
Posted inArt
Color Field, Then and Now
I fear that the visual culture in which these works were admired is now one of those distant “you had to be there” moments, which are impossible to reconstruct.
Posted inArt
Sculpting With Light, Drawing With Shadow
It’s hard to identify precedents for Christopher Wilmarth’s sculpture, which uses its banal modern materials purely abstractly.
Posted inArt
Taking Appropriation Too Far
To manipulate the historical record, I would think, is to abandon the search for truth.
Posted inArt
Kehinde Wiley Seizes the Throne
Wiley shows us that a Black man can indeed take the place of Napoleon.
Posted inArt
Jake Berthot’s Nowhere Land
All that I saw were some small and medium-sized paintings, mostly very dark, almost indistinguishable. How could I review this show?