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Art Rx
This week, performance takes over, plus DJ Spooky at the Metropolitan Museum and a festival dedicated to the Cinema of Transgression.
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Looking at Colonial Africa in Black and White
CINCINNATI — Meet Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes, who may be one of the last people to create a black-and-white movie. In order to make his art-house drama Tabu the way he wanted, Gomes searched and found one of the remaining labs in Europe capable of processing black and white 35mm film stock, r
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The Vandals Are No Longer Too Hot To Handle at MoMA
Last week, I witnessed an art event I thought would possibly never occur: the Museum of Modern Art made a serious step forward in recognizing the cultural importance of graffiti writing and hip hop at their fascinating panel discussion, "Writers and Writers: Narrative on the Page and in the Street."
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Mickalene Thomas and the Seduction of Beauty
Mickalene Thomas's current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum is a visual marvel. Bright colors, shimmering rhinestones, chaotic patterns, and bold-faced women abound. And not separately, mind you — Thomas has a proclivity for mashing up up into exquisitely rendered wholes that take the cut-and-paste
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The World According to Charles Ginnever
For those weary souls who claim that there is nothing new under the sun, especially in the realm of art, where everything has already been done, I offer this observation by Kenneth Baker, which appeared without fanfare in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle …
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The Last of the True Believers
Just the other day, I was deep in the bowels of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I thought of Paul Resika. I had met him briefly many years ago, when I was a graduate student and he was a guest critic. In the middle of a group critique he mentioned that he visited the
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Homage to a City's Queer History
CHICAGO — Edie Fake is a radical punk queer feminist activist. He is currently "at large" in Chicago. Before that, he was driving around the country in a yellow school bus doing the gay performance "Fingers." At the opening of his solo exhibition Memory Palaces at Thomas Robertello, he told me that
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Space-Age Architecture in an Unexpected Place
Like ghosts of a future that never arrived, the United States is littered with space age relics that landed in the 1940s to 1960s in the form of diners, banks, motels, and other commercial architecture. While the futuristic style definitely made its mark on the big coastal cities, like with Eero Saa
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The Naive Ramblings of a Polymathic Pop Star
Moby is a polymath, that we know. If we didn’t know that, we found out after visiting the tea shop he used to own on the Lower East Side. Maybe you’ve also heard other factoids about him too, like his support for animal rights or his alleged ancestral link to Herman Melville. We do not jest. (Actual
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The Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy from the Ancients to Today
SAN FRANCISCO — When learning Chinese, it's often difficult to appreciate the subtle beauty of each character. In the mist of trying to hammer each one into memory, a Chinese learner rarely pauses to admire the carefully crafted order of strokes and hidden meanings.
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No One Likes a Sunday Painter
Those who do make physical objects today are sometimes in danger of retreating so far into their own medium as to remove themselves from the conversation. I recently went to objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, an exhibition of six contemporary painters and sculptors at Chelsea's Krave
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Populating the Empty Spaces of Detroit
What's most often missing from pictures of Detroit are people. They don't quite work in the landscape of ruin porn, enamored as it of empty, decaying spaces that seem beautiful precisely because they're devoid of the life they once had. Showing people would suggest that Detroit is more than just a s