Dust the mothballs off your favorite ugly holiday sweater! Hyperallergic is celebrating the holidays with the Museum of Chinese in America and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop at our Ugly Sweater Party on Tuesday, December 18th at 8pm and we want you to be there.
Art
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Looking Around Miami Basel: Where Did All the Bodies Go?
MIAMI — There are many stories about the origins of art: ancient Greek historian Pliny suggested art was born when a Corinthian maiden traced the outline of her lover’s shadow on a wall, while an Asian legend tells of a young man who could not paint the Buddha because of his enlightened glow, and so was forced to paint his reflection in a pool of water. What these two stories share is the emphasis on the rendering of people as a foundational element of art. Fast-forward many millenia, when the story of high-priced contemporary art is vastly different from those origin stories, and walking through the latest incarnation of Art Basel Miami Beach, I was struck by the marginalization of the human form in the blue-chip work on display. What happened?
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Waste Not, Want Not: Phyllida Barlow’s New Work
As my colleague Thomas Micchelli pointed out in his review of siege, Phyllida Barlow’s exhibition of sculpture at the New Museum earlier this year, she has something in common with Hans Hoffman. Both were teachers who have an impressive roster of distinguished students. In Hoffmann’s case, it included Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Alfred Jensen and Red Grooms. Barlow’s students include Douglas Gordon, Steve Pippin, Tacita Dean and Rachel Whiteread. However, whereas Hoffman’s students eclipsed their teacher, this is hardly the case with Barlow.
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A Monstrous Woman: The Recent Paintings of Carroll Dunham
Carroll Dunham’s recent paintings are a dark comment on the tradition of the idyll, which goes back a long way in painting, and includes such modernist highpoints as Paul Gauguin’s “The Seed of the Areoi” (1892) and Henri Matisse’s “Luxe, Calme et Volupte” (1904) and “Joy of Life” (1906). In addition to celebrating rustic life, the idyllic tradition evokes an Eden-like world unaffected by evil and suffering.
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The Women of the Miami Project
MIAMI — The first artworks I enjoyed when I walked into the Miami Project, one of two newcomers to Art Basel Miami Beach fair week this year, were paintings by Monique Prieto at ACME. Then I discovered photographs by Lee Materazzi. After that, there was Daniela Comani’s wonderful installation “Beau De Jour,” and it was around that time that it hit me: so much of the work I was loving at the fair was by women.
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Does Authentic Social Critique Have a Place in Miami Fair Week?
MIAMI — Sometimes, the art world likes to slum it — hit up a yet-to-be-gentrified artist-studio neighborhood and forget about the world of the white cube. Miami, with its glitz, art-deco hotels, and penchant for plastic surgery, is quite a bit less gritty than New York City, but on Thursday night, artist Jonathan Horowitz brought a little bit of kitschy, lowbrow culture into a hotel party more notable for its glossy veneer and shiny clientele than any measure of local reality.
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Single Point Perspective: Psychodrama, Duplicity and Other Forms of Beauty
If you’re in the mood for a little hardcore strangeness, head over to the Morgan Library & Museum and check out Rosso Fiorentino’s “Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist,” an unfinished oil on panel currently on loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
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The Right Way to Do It Wrong: Three Takes at the Whitney
Last week the Whitney Museum announced its plan for the 2014 Biennial, which entrusts three curators with organizing the exhibition, but not as collaborators. Rather, each individual will be responsible for a single floor of the museum, dividing it, as chief curator Donna De Salvo told The New York Times, “like a layer cake.” This is a new wrinkle in the history of the Biennial, and director Adam Weinberg deserves credit for finding a new direction to take a show that has hit virtually every point on the compass. I read the announcement on the same day that I viewed the Whitney’s commendable Sinister Pop exhibition, and it occurred to me that the museum was already divided into three interrelated layers — or perhaps it would be more to the point to say three case histories — that offer a particular slant on recent developments in American art: Sinister Pop on floor two, Wade Guyton OS on three and Richard Artschwager! on four.
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An Artist Creates the Ruins of America
Danh Vo’s objects are unremarkable without history. We can debate until Miami freezes about over the place of artworks that don’t do much visually, that make references so opaque you have to a) be a specialist or b) have the work explained to you by an outside aid. Vo’s challenges to our assumptions about art are as frustrating as they are exciting.
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How Two Curators Will Bring a Chicago Sensibility to the 2014 Whitney Biennial
CHICAGO — The 2014 Whitney Biennial won’t be like every biennial before it. The always anticipated art world event will partly be a response to the Occupy movement’s call to end the Whitney Biennial, which charged that the major exhibition was just another art world commercial interest, and it will also be a swan song to the Whitney’s longtime home in the Marcel Breuer building, but many people may not realize that the event will also be different as it will welcome a Chicago curatorial approach into the mix, and that’s very exciting.
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Hyperallergic Hosts a Miami Party and Sponsors Blogger Event
This week, as you know, Hyperallergic is in Miami for the annual art fairs. But this year, and for the first time, Hyperallergic is hosting a party and sponsoring an event during the major art week.
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Using Art to Describe Labor
MIAMI — In the past year, there’s been a lot discussion about the Chinese workers who make Apple products. Exposés and reports have been written, all of which have presumably made us a bit more aware of the conditions under which those workers labor and live. But we still buy iPads and iPhones and MacBooks. Nothing much has really changed. There’s still a disconnect between the things we buy, the objects with which we surround ourselves, and the people who make them.
