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Obsessions: de Young, San Francisco, Photo Composites
Half the time I spend dumbfounded and in love with it has me asking myself whether or not it’s real, but San Francisco is still the easiest city in the world to have a crush on.
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Local Story, Int'l Film Hustler & Global Finance: Festival Circuitry
Is contemporary art becoming like art house cinema and its web of global funders and interests? Any healthy art machine requires a good circulatory system. It’s all well and good to make a work of art, but just as important is the machinery that connects the work of art to its intended or unintended
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Words and Pictures: A Controversy
Molly Norris has been told by the FBI that she needs to change her name and go into hiding because of a cartoon she drew making fun of Comedy Central for censoring South Park. I don’t know what to do about it, but I’m not going to respond by making a cartoon ridiculing Muslims. Maybe I’ll ridicule t
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Industrial Anxiety: Amanda Hughen, Roger Hiorns
Amanda Hughen and Roger Hiorns are two artists who look to the relationship between industrial and anxiety production as source material for their artistic practice. Hughen and Hiorns also serve as a study in contrasts, approaching the problem from different coasts, with different concepts, and in d
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Aiko's "Blog Post of an Exhibition" in Shanghai
Aiko’s recent exhibition at Andrew James Fine Art in Shanghai was actually made entirely in that Chinese city while she participated in the gallery’s residency program. This locality lends the work a different significance, a home-grown quality that’s reflected in the mix-in of Shanghai street signs
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Naturalizing the Cityscape, The Photos of David Burdeny
There’s something incredibly dark and disconcerting about descending from the sky towards the Chicago landscape. Maybe it’s the logic of it, or the orderliness. The clean gleaming oval of Lake Michigan. A boat or two, bobbing far from shore, the rest of them moored or clinging to that fault line bet
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Graffiti Laws Make No Sense: NYPD Arrests Watercolor Artist for Painting Outdoors
As part of her practice, Brooklyn artist Julie Torres temporarily tapes large sheets of paper to construction walls or other outdoor areas to paint large watercolors. On the afternoon of July 17, three intimidating plainclothes officers approached her at the corner of N11th and Bedford, arrested her
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Wild Things Got Nothin' on Matta (or Martin Renteria)
Cambridge, MA — I set out from my couch of the moment for some coffee since I am one of those murmuring morning people, the kind who requires a habit and a burnt tongue to prove to myself that I am, in fact, awake. On the short walk down the cramped sidestreets of residential Cambridge, I come face
Art
Outside the Box: New Media + Fast food
On September 9, the new midtown “de-junked” fast food restaurant 4food hosted the public opening of the second iteration of Julia Kaganskiy and Karen Bookatz’s migrating Blue Box Gallery. Dedicated to exhibiting new media art in alternative spaces, they also succeeded in using a space that would att
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Art + Sand = Taxidermy
The similarities between contemporary art and taxidermy are more numerous and more humorous than I realized, and thanks to a slightly too smart, vaguely discomforting show called Whitetail Deer, A to Z by Rebecca Lieberman at Anthony Greaney Gallery in Boston this similarity has been brought to my a
Art
Accidentally Forget your Weldon Kees?
Cambridge, MA — The first thing I wanted to see, for reasons that will become clear in a few days, was a Walter Gropius building. Instead, the first thing I came across was the most talented Nebraskan you've never heard of. I passed Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge on my way to look at an old Walt
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Gropius in Cambridge
Cambridge, MA — There’s something that makes Harkness Commons — also known as the Harvard Graduate Center, also known as Harvard’s first Modern building — odd … How did this proletarian architecture wind up palatable to an institution as well endowed as Harvard?