Artist Denyse Thomasos, whose semi-abstract paintings evoke an architecture of floating cities, died suddenly yesterday. The cause was an allergic reaction during a diagnostic medical procedure.
July 2012
Posted inOpinion
Overheard in the Art World
Every Friday (or so), we post things “Overheard in the Art World.” #OHAW Honestly, art world, don’t take yourself so seriously.
Posted inArt
Measuring an Artist’s Klout
While thinking about how the internet is changing how we find and promote art, it’s important to highlight a new tool that might help us understand our online presence: Klout. What is an artist’s reach? How many people can be expected to show up for a young artist’s solo show? Which critics really matter? These are questions that have only become more common, and although many of us feel queasy about the goings-on of the art market, and possibly more so about quantifying influence, it’s a reality we can’t ignore.
Posted inArt
The Long, Strange Art and Life of Yayoi Kusama
On the surface of this well-fueled publicity blitz, Yayoi Kusama is a dotty (pun intended) old grandma all about fun, polka dots and puffy balloons, including her eye-popping window display for the Louis Vuitton store on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. On the inside, which all the W magazine air kisses in the world can’t conceal, Kusama is about decades of raging struggles with precarious mental balance, gender, ethnicity, money, power, class, self-mythology, annihilation, life and death, peppered with a bit of wonder.
Posted inArt
Exploring Moscow’s Temple of Modernism
If someone were to tell me that I’d have to walk for an hour and a half down a number of unknown streets in the southern part of central Moscow to get from the main building of the State Tretyakov Gallery at 10 Lavrushinsky Lane to its 20th-century counterpart at 10 Krymsky Val, I’d still do it again in a heartbeat. That’s because the Tretyakov Gallery at 10 Krymsky Val houses what is arguably the best collection of 20th-century Russian art I have ever seen.
Posted inBooks
Working Through the End of Art
When the wide-eyed young painter Jim Holl came to New York City in the mid-1970s to study and make art he was shaken by the news that painting, according to the critics, was dead. Holl spent the next 20 years venturing outside the frame to find his place in this post-apocalyptic art world. His memoir, The Landscape Painter: 1974 through 1994, documents his journey.
Posted inArt
Unnatural Uses
BRISTOL, UK — Do you ever wake up in the morning and think: I must do something with that cow’s head today? If so, you have something in common with artist Geza Szollosi.
Posted inArt
Girl of the Southern Wild in Brooklyn
Greenpoint playwright and screenwriter Lucy Alibar mines her childhood for the magical movie ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’
Posted inNews
Are UK Police Cracking Down on Graffiti Artists Ahead of Olympics?
The British blogs and media are buzzing with reports that UK police are visiting the homes of graffiti writers in what appears to be an attempt to scare artists from leaving their mark during the city’s Olympic spotlight.
Posted inOpinion
Why Going Viral Isn’t Always a Good Thing
I love the internet. It’s jumbled and weird and mind-numbingly vast. It’s also the source of my employment. (Thanks, internet!) But I’m also worried about the internet — specifically the internet and art.
Posted inArt
Male Strippers and the Female Gaze
At first glance, Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Magic Mike, is about a charismatic male stripper looking to cash in his gold lamé G-string to pursue his dream of designing (and selling) custom-made furniture. Like many emerging artists that work as art handlers, he’s at a crossroads. He’s in his thirties, his body is beginning to break down, and the job that pays the bills is eating into his creativity, his passion. On closer inspection, Magic Mike is about the male body, and pleasure and gratification in looking at it in the movie theater, i.e., a darkened room.
