Doyle’s sculpture offers an opportunity to contemplate the beauty of pure form, but without a hint of nostalgia.
Phong Bui
Posted inArt
Reconciling Secular Art in Sacred Spaces
Surprises and puzzles in Venice and Vienna, from Sean Scully to Tintoretto.
Posted inBooks
Artist Interviews and the Literature of Self-Endorsement
In three recent volumes, artists express nostalgia for the smaller, scrappier New York art world.
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 inArt
Why Are There So Many Art Exhibition Revivals?
A big part of the art world is art history, and nowhere is that clearer than in the recent spate of exhibition revivals.
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 week’s edition of Required Reading comes a little later than usual, but aren’t all good things worth the wait? We’ll be back to our morning publishing schedule next Sunday. Enjoy the linkage.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week on Required Reading … William Powhida has devised a new power axis of art world affirmation … New York Observer explains the thing called the “professional collector” … at Idiom they ask an important question “Can an art experience be authentic even if the status of the work of art remains questionable?” … the NEA leaders gives signs that there will be cutting in the arts … Phong Bui chats with Joe Bradley … some mediations on Black History on Art:21 … and Iceland is digitizing ALL its literature …
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 inOpinion
Required Reading
The Left Rights’s “I’m on Crack” — Souren Melikian on 20th C Italian figural artists — Glenn Lowry speaks about new plans to expand the MoMA — the 10 best British buildings of the 21st C — Peter Saul interview in the Brooklyn Rail — From the Archives: “How I Got My DIt Degree” — Grayson Perry talks about shock in contemporary art — Anne Hedeman explores how medieval texts are interconnected
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.
