With a group show simply titled The Contract, the Lower East Side gallery Essex Street encourages us to consider an old proposition: the “Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement” by the pioneering dealer of conceptual art Seth Siegelaub and the lawyer Robert Projansky.
Hans Haacke
Posted inArt
The Pursuit of Art, 2014
The exhibitions that rippled through our cultural fabric over the past year, at least those occurring in and around New York, have registered the predictable number of highs and lows, though 2014 did manage to plumb one nadir unlikely to be matched for a good long time.
Posted inArt
Moving Targets: The Invisible Hand of Hans Haacke
David H. Koch, the left’s favorite low-hanging fruit, is the subject of Hans Haacke’s latest jeremiad on the state of institutional culture, an installation called “The Business Behind Art Knows the Art of the Koch Brothers” (2014), which takes aim at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly unveiled and much-pilloried David H. Koch Plaza.
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When Controversy and Failure Become Art
In the exhibition Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures at the Center for Book Arts, the documents, language and narrative of controversy, censorship and failure become a new form of work to consider.
Posted inOpinion
5 Artists Who Anticipated Festivus
Happy Festivus everyone! What is Festivus? It is a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 as a way to celebrate the holiday season without participating in its pressures and commercialism. It was popularized by Seinfeld.
Posted inArt
Mark Lombardi’s Information Art
A solo exhibition of works by Mark Lombardi at Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg, feels very timely. Maybe I’m into the paranoia-inducing conspiracy charts because New York’s just-ended art fair week, our own glimpse into the vastness of the international art world, reminded me that there are whole webs of infinite complex connections to the worlds and communities we inhabit. Lombardi’s intricate, highly-researched drawings are clear presentations of information that forces us to rethink how we see ourselves in relation to our political atmosphere.
