Posted inArt

Julian Schnabel’s Formula for Greatness

Since Julian Schnabel first gained attention with his broken plate paintings in the 1980s, he has been predisposed to working on found surfaces – animal skins, velvet, corduroy, sail cloth, tarpaulins, canvas flooring from boxing rings, wallpaper, navigation maps, flags, Kabuki theater backdrops, and photosensitive canvases – which help disguise the fact that he can’t draw in paint and doesn’t really have much feel for paint’s potentiality.

Posted inArt

The Pursuit of Art, 2013

Memories fade. That’s the one good reason, as far as I can see, to compile an end-of-year list. It’s sometimes startling to retrace what attracted my attention over the course of a year; it is also instructive to determine where such a miscellany of shows fits in with ongoing areas of interest, and which ones, in hindsight, merited the time it took to review them.

Posted inArt

In the Schnabel Chapel, Part 3

As an undergraduate, I took a seminar in contemporary art issues conducted by the theater designer Robert Israel, who once mused about coming across one of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1950s-era combines in a collector’s pristine white apartment. The artwork, composed of recycled scraps of garbage, “looked like it was peeing all over the place.”