Jeffrey Deitch out at MOCA, SAC Capital indicted, Lincoln Memorial vandalized, the hazardous storage of Smithsonian items, Walter de Maria and Alex Colville pass away, and more…
July 2013
Posted inArt
NYC Parks Welcome Student Artists
We may admire the mathematical formulae of analytic cubism, stand in awe before a serene Raphael, or tilt our heads in bemusement at one of Jeff Koons’s inflatable lobsters. But sometimes the most affective and accessible art is made by non-artists — by amateurs and children. Unassuming and genuine, this type of work can cut through the semantic haze of contemporary expression and speak with the plain, human voice of those rarely heard. Such is the joy of amateur art, and a New York City nonprofit has managed to capture it through the combined efforts of middle school students, contemporary artists, and devoted classroom art teachers. The issues explored range from bullying to guns in schools. The medium? A school lunchroom table.
Posted inArt
A Midsummer Group Show Dream
CHICAGO — As we settle into midway-through-summer mode here in the city that does sleep sometimes, we spend more time hanging at the beach, BBQing with friends and generally chillaxing. With this slowing down of general movement comes the proliferation of — wait for it! — the summer group show.
Posted inArt
Sculpture that Just Wants to Play
Some curious creatures have arrived in City Hall Park, although they look pretty miserable about it. Olaf Breuning’s “The Humans,” with its loop of anthropomorphic figures showing a story of humans evolving from fish to fisher king, has each whimsical figure sporting a deep frown upon their marble faces. While they’re definitely the most charming highlight of the new Lightness of Being Public Art Fund sculpture exhibition, there are 11 artists with playful art to discover elsewhere around the park.
Posted inOpinion
Collective Moods Transformed into a Rhapsody of Light
Artist Jennifer Wen Ma and lighting designer Zheng Jianwe have collaborated to create “Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light” at Beijing’s famed Water Cube aquatic center.
Posted inArt
The Inner Life of a Museum
Jem Cohen’s new feature film, Museum Hours, unfolds like a series of postcards from a lonely traveler, fresh with the pressure of on-site writing while calculating that the memory will be received miles and days away. Shooting primarily in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cohen’s foreign camera seeks the familiar: the stony wrinkles around ancient Roman eyes, a clean white egg inside a still life, a child’s ill-fitting hat in one of Bruegel’s noisy marketplaces. Art, Cohen seems to say, is a refuge for the outsider.
Posted inOpinion
Art Is the New Bitcoin, or Something
Last week, the Financial Times Alphaville blog weighed in on the whole “art as an asset/market” thing, joining the series of recent commentaries from Quartz and Felix Salmon on the topic.
Posted inNews
House Committee Seeks to Gut the NEA
In April, President Obama proposed his 2014 fiscal year budget, which, happily for us culture lovers, includes increases of some $15 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. But Obama’s proposal was just the first step in a long, winding budget process, and now the Republicans have spoken: they want to slash the NEA and NEH budgets in half.
Posted inArt
Teaching a Robot to Paint
We’re fascinated with robots doing human things, from Elektro chain-smoking its way through the 1939 World’s Fair to the Turk automaton that was beating people at chess during the 18th and 19th centuries (there turned out to be a human hiding inside the latter, but still). Now a team at the University of Konstanz in Germany has trained a robot to paint.
Posted inOpinion
The Masked Man of Honduras Brings Street Art to Its Knees
CHICAGO — A Honduran street artist who goes by the name of Urban Maeztro, a translation of “Urban Master,” is covering the walls of the country’s capital, Tegucicalpa, with posters of art historical images holding neon weapons.
Posted inArt
A View from the Easel
Artist studios in Indiana, California, Michigan, New York, and Germany.
Posted inArt
Two British Painters Use Style as Substance
Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005) and Gary Hume (born 1962) have 34 years between them, and yet their work is similar and compelling enough to warrant a twin retrospective at Tate Britain. Because the Tate has prudently divided the artists — “offering visitors the chance to see the work of two complementary British artists from different generations,” as the exhibition leaflet explains — the viewer experiences Caulfield and Hume individually. And because there are no descriptive captions alongside the artworks — only an accompanying pamphlet, which focuses on one work per room — the viewer is left to discover the connections between the artists herself.
