This week, Fujimoto’s Serpentine Pavilion is unveiled, expect more Flavins in the world, David Foster Wallace on a crisis in America, unpaid internships and privilege, Peter Zumthor’s proposal for LA, book covers as gendered spaces, the Hirshhorn Museum’s bubble pops, and more.
June 9, 2013
Posted inOpinion
Weekend Words: Shrink
Nowadays all of the world’s knowledge, or at least enough to fill an encyclopedia, can fit onto a flash drive. Weekend Words feels the pinch as the world shrinks further.
Posted inArt
George Sugarman’s Unrecognized Greatness
I am tired of critics characterizing George Sugarman (1912–1999) — whose work was either overlooked or marginalized during his lifetime — as an idiosyncratic sculptor. By labeling him in this way, they are able to suggest that the neglect was partially his own doing, and to imply that he wasn’t interested in formal issues thought to be integral to sculpture, and which had been explored by his innovative forebears: Constantin Brancusi, Julio Gonzalez, Alberto Giacometti and David Smith. If those are the measures of idiosyncrasy, then he clearly wasn’t that at all. In fact, the opposite seems more true to me — he was at the center of things, but hardly anyone dared to notice.
Posted inArt
Why Jeff Koons Made Michael Jackson White
I still remember the ripples of titillation — occasionally marked by muffled, satisfied guffaws — that spread predictably through the art world when Jeff Koons first exhibited his shiny white and gold porcelain sculpture, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988) at Sonnabend in 1989. The sculpture was part of the series, Banality, which became a definitive step toward garnering the kind of attention Koons has always craved.
