A question for the Yes Men as they launch their Kickstarter campaign to fund their film: You say that this film is about revolution. What would a revolution look like for the Yes Men?
October 2012
Posted inArt
Past Actions, Past Gestures: Conflux 2012
Expectation and experience seldom end up at the same destination, especially when you walk down a subway platform and see a sign that reads “To Breuckelen” and realize — no, no, the MTA hasn’t sold the L line back to the Dutch to save money; rather, you are seeing a sign hung by artist Daniel Bejar (not that one) as part of his Get Lost! installation.
Posted inComics
Life Plan: Step 1. Gain Underground Cult Following …
Ugh … life, a five-step program …
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week, scoring US Congress on the arts, Gangnam Style opinions and facts, science looks at us looking at art, the Seattle Art Museum goes all female, the highest skyscraper is going to be built in five months, Daniel Liebeskind is not an architect, and more.
Posted inOpinion
Weekend Words
With Halloween around the corner and Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” taking up temporary residence at the Museum of Modern Art, the first Weekend Word is “terror”:
Posted inPoetry
Swallow the Meat in the Jargon
Amelia Rosselli’s is not exactly a poetry or resistance, but it is a resistant poetry. It is highly self-conscious, willed, and formally wrought. At the same time it is the product of roiling psychological and social tensions that the poet can hardly control. As Andrea Zanzotto put it, in 1976, with the authority that comes from being one of Rosselli’s few peers among the Italian poets of her time, she “was born inside this writing, and cannot escape from it; and at the same time she is outside of it, and has always contested it.” Yes, she writes, and with a fury; but she is also written, and by forces that shake her to the core. Her poetry is indissolubly both these writings.
Posted inArt
Hidden in Plain Sight – Wade Guyton’s Dirty Pictures
For anyone who has been following painting in New York since the beginning of the 21st century, it is not surprising that the mid-career survey devoted to Wade Guyton is currently the main attraction at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is also not surprising that the show has been very well received in newspapers and magazines by the likes of Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz.
Posted inMusic
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (October 2012)
This month, reviews of Twin Shadow, Bob Dylan,The Rough Guide to Highlife, Istanbul 70, The Sheepdogs, Orient Noir, Deadmau5, and Jens Lekman.
Posted inArt
Single Point Perspective: Michelangelo’s Telltale Elbow
One of the standouts of the new exhibition Dürer to de Kooning: 100 Master Drawings from Munich at the Morgan Library and Museum – if not the standout – is Michelangelo’s “St. Peter (after Massaccio) with Arm Studies.” (And for an exhibition bristling with stunners by Matthias Grünewald, Andrea Mantegna, and Fra Bartolomeo — not to mention Dürer and de Kooning — that’s saying a lot.)
Posted inArt
Disappearing Act: Rosemarie Trockel at the New Museum
It’s not very often that one can report that a triptych by an orangutan isn’t the best thing in a show, but it’s not very often that one has the opportunity to take stock of Rosemarie Trockel’s art.
The triptych is a brushy abstraction by a simian named Tilda, and it is hanging on the second floor of the New Museum, where the major exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos is ranging across three stories of gallery space.
Posted inOpinion
Berkeley’s Giant Bonsai Trees
BERKELEY, California — Berkeley’s unusually large population of giant Bonsai-like trees has caught my attention since moving from Brooklyn. Why are they here and what do they mean?
Posted inOpinion
Should Museums Exhibit Bad Art?
BBC Arts Editor and former Tate director Will Gompertz has a piece in the Wall Street Journal this week advocating a curious proposal: museums, he says, should mount shows of bad art.
