Art
Art Rx: Frieze Week
Two words, darlings: art fairs! Frieze New York has spawned a bona fide fair week. But if you suffer from fair fatigue, don't worry: the doctor's got plenty of other recommendations.
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EXCLUSIVE: Meet Artists from Creative Growth Center on Pharrell's YouTube Channel
If you're an art-loving person, there's a good chance you've seen work by artists from the Creative Growth Center. Their art has been shown in galleries and museums worldwide; you might, for instance, have strolled past some of it at last fall's Rosemarie Trockel retrospective at the New Museum. But
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What's Going on at the SF Fine Arts Museums?
For more than six months, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have been in the news nonstop. Robert Flynn Johnson, the museums' curator emeritus, summed it up pretty well when he called the museums' situation “a state of Orwellian dysfunction.” And that's just the news that's been reported.
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Viral Image to Real Rubbers: Pop Pope
MILWAUKEE — When a story, an image of a work of art, or an essay goes viral, it has struck a cultural nerve, somewhere, and people can’t stop passing it on. The work itself becomes freed of the space where it was first realized; it is taken over by global internet culture and social networks, co-opt
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Early Anatomical Specimens Model the Macabre
Long before Body Worlds shocked people with its theatrically preserved people or Damien Hirst even thought to dunk a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde, scientists were erring into the realm of art with their attempts at preserving life for anatomical study. The specimens in particular that emerge
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Shock of the Old: The Pre-Raphaelites Go Back to the Future
In its first iteration in London, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, the survey now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, bore the edgier title Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. We may not customarily think of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) — founded in secret
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Who’s Afraid of Hot Pink, Canary Yellow, and Midnight Blue?
Color is frightening. From the color of one’s skin to the color of a painting, it can stir up unlikely obsessions: all kinds of irrational responses tend to explode without provocation. Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko have two things in common: wide expanses of color and the proclivity for people to
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Star Search: Heaven's Map for Getting Lost
"Billions and billions of stars.” Carl Sagan’s awestruck if indeterminate census of the universe became a comic catchphrase in the wake of his 1980s PBS series Cosmos. Johnny Carson would intone the line, exaggerating the astrophysicist’s sing-songish repetition of billions and we’d laugh. Not becau
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Single Point Perspective: Dürer’s Doomed Knight
Last week I wrote about several drawings and watercolors from the spectacular exhibition of works on paper by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) at the National Gallery of Art, leaving aside the show’s phenomenal selection of prints. I would like to return, however, to one engraving in particular.
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Running the Gamut: Trudy Benson’s Flamboyant Restraint
Still in her twenties with three solos under her belt, Trudy Benson has been garnering a lot of attention, and it’s easy to see why. Her raucously impastoed paintings, as luscious as they are jarring, are abstraction as sheer ebullience — ambrosia for anyone open to the innate pleasures of color, te
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Singing for Shy People with Voice-Activated Instruments
As the Cat Stevens–loving Maude declared to a morose Harold in the 1971 film Harold and Maude, "If you want to sing out, sing out!" But for those of us who are too self-conscious or cursed by shrill tones and off-key octaves, having such belting confidence is hard. For such introverts, Ranjit Bhatna
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Shock and Awe at Hunter College's MFA Open Studios
Meandering the dim halls of Hunter College's admittedly hideous MFA Studio Building in Hell's Kitchen for their recent MFA Open Studios, peering into every open door I could find, I expected to be fascinated by the selection of emerging artists contained within the small, often shared studios — but