News
We always say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whether it's destroying a blasphemous print, banning Robert Mapplethorpe from NEA funding, or censoring the David with a fig leaf, art presents some pretty easy flashpoints for scandal. Chief among them: nudity. An obvious lack of clothing rarely f
Opinion
ArtReview released its annual Power 100 yesterday, a document that makes a spirited attempt at putting the art world into numbers. The list held a few surprises, but really, what was most un-surprising about the whole affair was how lame and mainstream it was while frontin' a snarky facade, insider-
Opinion
This chart may be all you need to decide what font, I mean typeface, to use for a current or upcoming project. Design historian Steven Heller reminded me a few weeks ago that I use the terms font and typeface interchangeably, point taken (even though my mom was a graphic designer and I should know b
Opinion
The Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture, an ambitious exhibition that (kinda) rethinks the standard narrative of Abstract Expressionism (aka AbEx), has been open since October 3. The show complicates things by reintroducing us to artists not entirely within the Ab
Art
One might be excused for mistaking Fred Tomaselli’s solo show at the Brooklyn Museum for a pharmacy. Upon closer look, the collaged paintings, baroquely-arranged magazine clippings coated in a thick layer of resin, are embedded with pills the way a microchip is implanted under the skin. Sometimes th
News
We have an update on Julie Torres, the watercolor artist who was bizarrely arrested for painting in public. We reported the full story a few weeks ago and L Magazine published her personal story yesterday. And now an update in L Magazine from the artist after yesterday’s court date … which features
Art
Between World War I and II, there was a strong gust of classicism that swept through the Western European avant-garde. Artists from across the continent embraced the language of the ancients as a way to reflect their own time and culture. This taste for antique forms can be interpreted in many diffe
Books
OUR FIRST WEDNESDAY BOOK REVIEW! Reading Lawrence Weschler’s nigh-legendary book on Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, inspired me to next grab the New Yorker writer’s other artist-focused book, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations With David Hockney. As e
Art
A small coconut tree grows in the corner of Nurture Art. Simply titled “Coconut” (2009), and created by artist Gudmundur Thoroddsen, the leaves seem to reach towards the skylight. A certain twist makes it art — a few of the leaves are painted pink. It resembles one of Matisse’s colorful trees come t
Art
One of protean German artist Joseph Beuys' most famous quotes runs, "Everyone is an artist." Framed within the artist's idea of "social sculpture," a conceptual practice in which our lived world forms a gigantic work of art and individuals become artists in its context, the quote makes sense. The wa
Art
Felice Varini uses nothing but a bit of color, applied to a wall, to shake you from of your routine and, so he hopes, brighten one of memory’s grey spots a little in a moment of world-flattening surreality. In doing so, Varini is not unlike other artists that have sought to place the viewer within t
Opinion
This video from Imaginary Forces is a short film directed by Mark Gardner that interviews various creative types on the idea of a "desk." Not just the plain old place you throw down your laptop and toil, but the concept of what a desk really is. Is a desk just the place where you work, or can a desk