This undertaking is playing out today in New Orleans, amid calls to remove the city’s 17 confederate monuments.
Gordon Matta-Clark
Posted inArt
40 Years After His Death, Gordon Matta-Clark Takes on New Relevance
The work of Gordon Matta-Clark, an artist best known for carving massive holes into derelict walls, has renewed symbolic power in today’s political climate.
Posted inArt
A Mega-Gallery Marks a Quarter Century
I remember David Zwirner Gallery back in the 1990s, before Chelsea, when the New York art world was much smaller and more manageable.
Posted inOpinion
Seven New York City Streets That Should Be Renamed After Artworks
Today New York’s City Council voted on a proposal to co-name the block of Stuyvesant Avenue between Lexington Avenue and Quincy Street in Brooklyn “Do the Right Thing Way” after the Spike Lee joint that was filmed there in 1989.
Posted inArt
The Failures of 1970s Suburban Life
In the film Over the Edge (1979), the worst fears of a suburban planned community come true when the teenage residents of the fictional town of New Granada attack a town meeting being held to discuss just exactly what went wrong with the violent, angst-filled youth of their town.
Posted inArt
Booze, Food, Balloon Dogs, and Performance at Frieze New York
Frieze New York is an undeniably nice fair. Even if you generally hate art fairs, or sympathize with the union workers, or a devotee of the Armory Show, you have to admit that Frieze does it right: the spacious, light-filled tent, the excellent food options, the weekend-getaway feel as you board the ferry to Randall’s Island.
Posted inArt
The Architectural Is Always Political
New York’s East 53rd Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, is full of nondescript Manhattan skyscrapers. In the courtyard of one of these clinically clean buildings, however, there are five crumbling, old slabs of concrete covered in graffiti. It’s hard to believe that these blocks, so out of place in their surroundings, were once part of one of the most politically charged structures in the world, one that divided the globe in two based on ideology and geopolitics — the Berlin Wall.
Posted inArt
Gay Sex, Art and Nostalgia on the New York Waterfront
While at The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, one question kept popping up in my mind: What is with this obsessive nostalgia for the decaying, destroyed and often depressing New York of the past, particularly as connected to the emerging gay subculture and downtown art scene of the 1970s and ’80s?