Dan Matutina’s Versus/Hearts tumblelog contrasts rivals in a loving heart-shaped embrace.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week, reflections on the death of Thomas Kinkade, the real-life location of The Simpsons‘s Springfield, Ai Weiwei sues Chinese tax collectors, Beijing’s “rat tribe,” Snarkitecture, a Keith Haring mural is threatened in Paris, a look at Exit art, the average age of social media users and cats imitating famous paintings.
Posted inArt
Why There Are Great Artists (Part 3)
The rigorous parameters that Sylvia Plimack Mangold established in her earlier bodies of work (the floor paintings and the landscapes framed by “tape”) continue to inform her paintings of individual trees (specifically the maple, elm, locust, and pink oak), which have been focus of her attention since the early 1980s. Year after year, in different seasons and subtly changing light, the artist has returned to the same handful of subjects seen from the same tightly cropped viewpoint.
Posted inBooks
Tuning In: Devin Johnston’s Verse Seeks to Fill the Nothing with Song
The title of Devin Johnston’s fourth book of poems, Traveler, might suggest that the work will offer some series of narratives about moving from place to place. To be sure, the poems are generated by specific sites, from the Scottish Highlands to the American midlands. Yet, what characterizes these poems is an imagistic intensity and precision that evokes the process of engaged concentration, particularly in regard to the natural world.
Posted inBooks
The Verse That Could Happen: National Poetry Month to the Rescue?
A couple of months back I was sitting in an East Village dive bar enjoying, oh, I don’t know, my third or fourth whiskey (it was Tuesday, after all), when I noticed a very attractive girl next to me committing what appeared to be lines of verse onto a yellow notepad. Hang on, I thought: a fetching young poet sitting next to me in some blighted Manhattan grotto? What movie are you in, buddy? I stole a second glance. True enough, there was her pen scribbling curtly on the paper, and there were the one or two-word stanzas — illegible, from where I sat — filling up the left-hand side of the page in cursive, like the lines of an EKG.
Posted inArt
Rembrandt’s Brush: A Ghost Story
Rembrandt’s “Portrait of the Artist” (ca. 1663–65) from Kenwood House, London, just landed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a seven-week run.
Posted inArt
The Wonders of the Human Brain
The brain and perception are, in the words of Buster Poindexter, “hot, hot, hot,” with the buzz they are generating in certain reaches of the art world. Curators Koan Jeff Baysa and Caitlin Hardy, both medical doctors, should be commended for surveying this vast subject with their exhibition Seeing Ourselves, though it proffers mixed results.
Posted inArt
The Power of Luxury at the Metropolitan Museum
The Met’s Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition is a treat for viewers who appreciate the ways that power and continuity are expressed in both luxury items and everyday objects.
Posted inNews
Listening to the Voices of the Chelsea Hotel
Everyone hopes that the missing art from the Chelsea Hotel will reappear after the current renovation. But even if it does, there’s no question that the passing of the hotel’s ownership from beloved landlord Stanley Bard to mega-developer Joseph Chetrit marks the end of an era. To celebrate that era, and the Chelsea Hotel tenants who lived through it, four Brooklyn artists have created “This Is My Home: Voices from the Chelsea Hotel,” an audio-accompanied, one-day-only walking tour on April 29.
Posted inOpinion
The Quietest Room on Earth Will Drive You Crazy
LOS ANGELES — We all seek peace and quiet in our studio work. For some, the studio is a sacred place, where the work comes alive in solitude and silence. But can there be too much solitude and silence?
Posted inArt
Feeling Vulnerable in Uniform
Two shows in Chelsea look at conformity, the uniform and the limits of masculinity. Catherine Opie photographs boys in athletic gear while Ian Davis paints herds of men in suits.
Posted inArt
Comfort in Limbo
If you find yourself at the Museum of Arts and Design this spring, be sure to check out its survey of unsettling quasi-documentary videos by Julika Rudelius, titled What Is on the Outside. The pieces, which were created by Rudelius between 2001 and 2010, range in length from three to 29 minutes, and the complete program will be playing on a continuous loop until July 5.
