Guggenheim Museum
Posted inArt

The Taming of Christopher Wool

by Howard Hurst

Christopher Wool is having a moment. Arguably his most famous painting, “Apocalypse Now,” will be offered on the auction block on November 12 as part of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art evening sale, with an estimate of $15–20 million. His retrospective at the Guggenheim, organized by associate curator Katherine Brinson, opened late last month to much fanfare.

Posted inArt

Visions of Light at the Guggenheim

by Jillian Steinhauer

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York is one of the most famous contemporary art institutions in the world, and yet part of that fame, lending the place a kind of quasi-notoriety, is the idea that the building itself isn’t actually a great venue for showing art. Or as architecture Paul Goldberger wrote a few years ago in The New Yorker, “the charge that the building upstages the art has become part of its legend.” In my experiences at the Guggenheim, I’ve found that the legend often holds true — the perpetually sloping spirals of the space make for excellent wandering but distracted art viewing. In a new work by Light and Space artist James Turrell, however, the building may have finally found its match.

Posted inArt

The Alchemical Art Innovators of Postwar Japan

by Ellen Pearlman

Fifteen years in the making, the current Guggenheim exhibition on Gutai presents a groundbreaking spectrum of the art of that group, shaking to its core the notion of the West as the epicenter of contemporary art practices. The show, curated by Ming Tiampo, associate professor of art history at Carlton University, Ottawa, and Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the museum, is titled Gutai: Splendid Playground, an odd sobriquet to describe the annihilating force that birthed the group in postwar Japan.

Posted inArt

When Artspeak Masks Oppression

by Mostafa Heddaya

“Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?” So asks online art publication Triple Canopy’s widely circulated essay “International Art English,” in which the authors catalogued the death of meaning in the language of contemporary art. It’s a perceptive study, though after offering a half-alternative (“the elite … will opt for something like conventional highbrow English”). the article ends in media res with a sarcastic shrug: an evocative morsel of IAE — a press release — reformatted into a prose poem.

By so abstracting their position into parody, the authors misread the most significant consequence of this new language, loosed upon a world in which prisoners of conscience languish in the jails of the world’s emerging contemporary art superpowers. The unsurprising reality is that a specialized language fraught with euphemism and obfuscation is better known as propaganda.

Posted inArt

Gabriel Orozco Brings Beach Collecting to the Guggenheim, I-Spy Style

by Kyle Chayka

In a side gallery off the Guggenheim’s main spiral, it looks like a tide of water came and went, leaving behind piles of bricks, wood, and detritus ripped from their original contexts and tossed into disarray. It’s not unlike certain parts of the New York City area, post-Sandy. The difference is that in the museum, the scrabble is neatly arranged into a rectangular patch of floor and organized by color in a rainbow gradient only slightly darkened by mud.