Recently I was talking to a sculptor friend and made a flippant remark that it seemed to me as if “abstract painting is back.” A seasoned 65 to my slight 27, he smiled as he asked: “Again?”
Art
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ArtPrize and Its Discontents
CHICAGO — At surface value, ArtPrize is all giant flowers, mythical dragons, yarn-bombed trees, and cash galore. Begun in 2009, the annual event attracts thousands of visitors from Michigan and elsewhere, a strange combination of populism and art world elitism wrapped into one — but it is not an idealistic “coming together” of the two populations.
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Christine Hill’s Small Business
I had just finished reading The House of the Seven Gables when I encountered Berlin-based American artist Christine Hill’s artist-shop “Small Business,” the current iteration of her ongoing project Volksboutique, which has taken the form of a number of shops, “organizational ventures,” and interventions with commerce since 1993.
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Systems That Set You Free: Current Work by Steve Roden
At last, New York is getting to see a broad range of work by Steve Roden, an L.A.-based artist who makes paintings, drawings, sculptures, sound compositions and sound installations determined by self-invented systems.
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Beer with a Painter: Sarah Lutz
While on Cape Cod this summer, I visited the painter Sarah Lutz in her home high above the bay.
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Next Stop, Reality: A Sixties Radicalism Revisited
Radio Waves: New York “Nouveau Réalisme” and Rauschenberg at Sperone Westwater is a long-overdue exhibition revolving around the enigmatic Swiss artist Jean Tinguely.
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Heavy Metal Fatalist: Chris Burden at the New Museum
What’s most compelling about Chris Burden: Extreme Measures — the Los Angeles-based artist’s first New York retrospective, which has taken over five floors of the New Museum — is what’s not there. Or almost not there.
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Why the Bushwick Film Festival Is Different
It’s hard to believe that the Bushwick Film Festival is six years old, but co-founder Kweighbaye Kotee explains that it has slowly grown to a festival that will be screening 4 feature films and 10 short films, hosting 4 panels, an art show, a live-taping for a television show, and an award ceremony all over the course of four days.
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Exclusive Highlights from Performa 13’s Surrealist Reader
Here is an exclusive look at Performa’s Surrealist Reader, along with excerpts of many of the texts.
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Photographing the State of the Environment in the 1970s
Back in the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency sent over 70 photographers to all 50 states in order to document the environmental concerns of the regions.
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The Digital Literacy of Tristan Perich’s Sound
HANOVER, New Hampshire — When Tristan Perich, creator of the “Microtonal Wall” for the Museum of Modern Art’s Soundings exhibition, told me that understanding computer languages was now practically “a prerequisite for living,” two things came to mind.
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Invaluable Grossmalerman Tips on Art Openings
You know, speaking of the Fall Openings Season, students often ask me whether there is any particular etiquette regarding how an artist should behave at openings.
