I admit to feeling crippled by the New Museum’s Here and Elsewhere show. As the first major show of art from the “Arab world” in a New York museum, it stirs a huge well of emotions and frustrations about a topic that needs volumes to unpack.
September 2014
Posted inArt
Objects of Wonder: Paintings and Sculptures by Richard Whitten
Richard Whitten’s paintings are provoking. They refuse to act entirely like paintings but are exceedingly not sculpture. They baffle you with titles in French, German, and Italian, optical illusions, and spatial inconsistencies rendered with mathematical precision.
Posted inArt
Never Explain: Vilaykorn Sayaphet’s Painted Memories
It’s great to look at something that makes the experience of looking seem more important than the need to explain what you saw. Vilaykorn Sayaphet’s exhibition Latmanikham & Thongsy at English Kills Gallery offers just such an opportunity.
Posted inArt
Beer with a Painter: Todd Bienvenu
Todd Bienvenu’s studio is filled with stacks: art books on the floor, paintings leaning against the wall. Bienvenu’s work deals with omnivorous appetites – for company, pleasure, fun, music.
Posted inArt
Strangely Familiar: The Art of the Chinese Album
The Art of the Chinese Album, the outrageously beautiful exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, chronicles nearly 800 years of variations on a hybrid theme: painting and the book, fused into cinematically sequenced images, a meditative synthesis that speaks to our cultural disarray with startling immediacy.
Posted inBooks
Is Norway an Artist Book Paradise?
Norway, the enigmatic teardrop of a nation that crowns the Scandinavian peninsula, could be considered heaven or hell depending on whom you ask.
Posted inArt
At a Space in Queens, Avant-Music Plus Community
The Pecos River runs through New Mexico and Texas, forming a locale in the latter state colloquially known as Trans Pecos. Also referred to as Far West Texas, it’s a coarse region famous for its rough topography, Terlingua chili cook-off, and in recent years, revitalized arts economy.
Posted inNews
Art Movements
This week in art news: Auction companies oppose an appeal rehearing for the California Resale Royalty Act, the British Museum is to be recreated in Minecraft, and a time capsule was discovered in the head of a lion atop the Bostonian Society.
Posted inArt
Francesco Clemente in India
One of things I have always loved about the Rubin Museum is their fearlessness when it comes to exhibition design and color.
Posted inArt
Delusions of Grandeur: GCC at MoMA PS1 and the New Museum
What does it mean when the people hired to make a body of work relevant, as the magazine Bidoun was for the collective GCC, call it “quick and cute and perfectly timed”?
Posted inArt
A New Documentary for the Forger Who Infiltrated America’s Art Museums
For three decades, Mark Landis quietly infiltrated art museums across the United States with donated forgeries, works he carefully copied himself from the whole of art history.
Posted inPerformance
Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet Salvage Songs from Hurricane Sandy
Laurie Anderson was already working on a cycle of songs with Kronos Quartet when on October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy rose the Hudson River into her West Village home.
