Surprises and puzzles in Venice and Vienna, from Sean Scully to Tintoretto.
Brooklyn Rail
Posted inNews
Staff and Board Members Leave Brooklyn Rail En Masse
More than a dozen people, including all the current senior editorial staff, are leaving the revered culture journal.
Posted inOpinion
Let’s All Argue About Digital Art
You’re digital! I’m digital! We’re all digital! No better way to stir the pot than to bring up the post-IRL condition that has us all confused: What does it mean that we spend so much time online? How are artists engaging technology? Everyone’s arguing, from the curmudgeonly Artforum-approved art historian Claire Bishop to curator Lauren Cornell and author Eleanor Heartney. Here’s what they’re saying.
Posted inArt
An Artist Caught Between Two Floods
As has been all too visible in the tossed wreckage of homes and devastation of whole neighborhoods from the recent storm, floods ravage what they consume into fragments, pulling away some things and leaving the rest in disorder ready for decay. Although Phong Bui’s current exhibition at Show Room, Work According to the Rail, Part I (After the Flood), was planned before Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, it features 25 collage paintings mostly created after a flood in the artist and Brooklyn Rail publisher’s studio this past August that destroyed around 20 percent of his work. Unfortunately, Bui was also hit hard by Sandy just a day after the opening at Show Room, telling Hyperallergic that his Greenpoint studio was “decimated” by flooding that rose from the Newtown Creek.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This weekend’s Required Reading brings us up to speed on the situation of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, plus catches up on some of the things we missed while breaking the news, from movies demystifying the myth of the artist to video games histories and questions of morality and happiness.
Posted inBooks
Reading Brooklyn Rail’s November Issue
This month’s Brooklyn Rail didn’t just update me on the critical reception of the past months’ art exhibitions, it also kept me well-informed about the state of vegetarian burritos, Indian call centers and the misunderstood G train! The November issue (my copy is elegantly covered in a Jonas Mekas lithograph of a hand cradling a flower bud) is a primer for anyone who hasn’t necessarily seen all of the right shows and read all of the right books for the recent spat of cultural production. Taken as a whole, though, the weighty newsprint publication’s most interesting articles lay in unexpected places and concern unexpected topics.
Posted inOpinion
Get Your William Powhida-Designed Howdy Koonsy T-Shirt Today!
Trickster and art star William Powhida is at it again and he has partnered with the Brooklyn Rail to produce a limited edition t-shirt, titled “Howdy Koonsy.” The t-shirt is available in an edition of 666 and you can be sure they will go fast!
Posted inOpinion
Jerry Saltz Fires Back at Yau, “How Very Dickish”
The war of words between two major New York art critics escalated yesterday when Saltz used his very public Facebook wall to shoot back at Yau for the Brooklyn Rail art editor’s accusation of Saltz being a Koons apologist.
Posted inArt
Battle for the Nation: John Yau Questions Jerry Saltz’s America
In the newly released edition of the Brooklyn Rail, editor John Yau takes on New York Magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz and his characterization of America as “big, bright, shiny, colorful, crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized, fussy, twisted, and, let’s face it, ditzy.” Yau asks, “Is this ‘our America?’ Or is this Jerry Saltz shilling for Jeff Koons?”
