Art
I’m sure everyone reading this blog has had the same brain-fart online experience: someone sends you a link, you catch something on Twitter, you open a recommendation from a friend, but as soon as it pops in to a new tab in your browser, you forget about it. It’s not that the new thing isn’t interes
News
We always say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whether it's destroying a blasphemous print, banning Robert Mapplethorpe from NEA funding, or censoring the David with a fig leaf, art presents some pretty easy flashpoints for scandal. Chief among them: nudity. An obvious lack of clothing rarely f
Opinion
ArtReview released its annual Power 100 yesterday, a document that makes a spirited attempt at putting the art world into numbers. The list held a few surprises, but really, what was most un-surprising about the whole affair was how lame and mainstream it was while frontin' a snarky facade, insider-
Opinion
The Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture, an ambitious exhibition that (kinda) rethinks the standard narrative of Abstract Expressionism (aka AbEx), has been open since October 3. The show complicates things by reintroducing us to artists not entirely within the Ab
Art
One might be excused for mistaking Fred Tomaselli’s solo show at the Brooklyn Museum for a pharmacy. Upon closer look, the collaged paintings, baroquely-arranged magazine clippings coated in a thick layer of resin, are embedded with pills the way a microchip is implanted under the skin. Sometimes th
Books
OUR FIRST WEDNESDAY BOOK REVIEW! Reading Lawrence Weschler’s nigh-legendary book on Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, inspired me to next grab the New Yorker writer’s other artist-focused book, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations With David Hockney. As e
Art
One of protean German artist Joseph Beuys' most famous quotes runs, "Everyone is an artist." Framed within the artist's idea of "social sculpture," a conceptual practice in which our lived world forms a gigantic work of art and individuals become artists in its context, the quote makes sense. The wa
Opinion
This video from Imaginary Forces is a short film directed by Mark Gardner that interviews various creative types on the idea of a "desk." Not just the plain old place you throw down your laptop and toil, but the concept of what a desk really is. Is a desk just the place where you work, or can a desk
Art
The Museum of Modern Art's sprawling re-envisioning of Abstract Expressionism, "Abstract Expressionist New York," inspires a lot of looking. The stately museum's upper floor galleries, previously dedicated to the slow progress of abstraction in modern art, have been shuffled around to get a better v
Opinion
When a female Duke student's "fuck list" went viral, the entire online world was exposed to her in-depth list of male conquests, a powerpoint presentation of sex that was less sexy than academic. Framed as "thesis research," the document is so detailed that it actually reads more like research than
Opinion
Establishment iconoclast Banksy just took his next step into the mainstream. The street artist, known for his pranks that stretch from painted urban walls to film, has directed the opening sequence for The Simpsons television show. The animation is an interesting vehicle for Banksy given its massive
News
Ai Weiwei, internationally famed artist and chief provocateur of the Chinese art world, opened his London Turbine Hall installation today, the eleventh, and first for an Asian artist, in the Tate's Unilever series of exhibitions. The installation forms a gesture both classic for the artist and yet t