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.
David Carrier
David Carrier’s most recent books are Art Writing Online: The State of the Art World and Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art: Maria Bussmann’s Drawings. His book In Caravaggio’s Shadow: Naples as a Work of Art is forthcoming.
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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.
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Taking Appropriation Too Far
To manipulate the historical record, I would think, is to abandon the search for truth.
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Kehinde Wiley Seizes the Throne
Wiley shows us that a Black man can indeed take the place of Napoleon.
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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?
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Do the Old Masters Still Speak to Us?
Now and then, I suspect that an honest art writer might feel as if he or she is losing it.
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When the Exhibition Becomes a Work of Art
Who would have thought that still lifes would create such a strong reaction?
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The Endlessly Inventive Jörg Immendorff
Imagine Gustave Courbet’s materialism joined to Max Beckmann’s aggressive color, with a dash of Caspar David Friedrich’s visionary panoramas thrown in.
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El Greco, Modernist Hero
Set the works of El Greco alongside those of Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, or Pablo Picasso, and you can see why they admired and copied him.
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Are We Prepared to Look Seriously at de Chirico?
I want to resist any temptation to interpret these pictures, to reveal ‘meanings,’ instead of acknowledging the ways they underscore the strangeness of the workaday world.
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Andy Warhol Dreams of God
Because the contemporary art world is such a secular place, there hasn’t been much attention given to Warhol-the-Catholic, until now.