I wonder if the reason Rosalyn Drexler isn’t better known is because she is so good at so many different things. We recognize such mastery in men, but rarely in women.
Pop Art
Posted inArt
Tom Sachs’s Pointless Americana
PARIS — In a search for art that reacts to the inequalities of globalization, must art lose touch with the sort of grace that exceeds the hand, a grace that couldn’t be anything but artificial and technological?
Posted inArt
London Goes (Back to) Pop
LONDON — Pop Art was born in the UK, not in the US. We all probably know that, even if we tend to forget it, dazzled by decades spent worshipping Andy Warhol.
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A Pop Artist Who’s Never Conformed
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Derek Boshier, who conflates the “pop” in Pop art with “pop” as in “pop in and out,” never has conformed to art world expectations.
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The Right Way to Do It Wrong: Three Takes at the Whitney
Last week the Whitney Museum announced its plan for the 2014 Biennial, which entrusts three curators with organizing the exhibition, but not as collaborators. Rather, each individual will be responsible for a single floor of the museum, dividing it, as chief curator Donna De Salvo told The New York Times, “like a layer cake.” This is a new wrinkle in the history of the Biennial, and director Adam Weinberg deserves credit for finding a new direction to take a show that has hit virtually every point on the compass. I read the announcement on the same day that I viewed the Whitney’s commendable Sinister Pop exhibition, and it occurred to me that the museum was already divided into three interrelated layers — or perhaps it would be more to the point to say three case histories — that offer a particular slant on recent developments in American art: Sinister Pop on floor two, Wade Guyton OS on three and Richard Artschwager! on four.
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Art for the Hell of It: The Sinister Side of Pop
Maybe the Whitney Museum’s exhibition Sinister Pop should be titled Discarding Pop. And by that I mean Pop as a label that implies a common mindset rather than a common set of tools.
Posted inBooks
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who Is Andy Warhol?
The memoirs penned by the late Andy Warhol (with help from his assistant Pat Hackett), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and Back Again, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, and the Andy Warhol Diaries, are more like an extension of his artwork than they are great works of prose.
Posted inOpinion
Brace Yourselves, Lady Gaga Goes ARTPOP
Lady Gaga awoke yesterday and calculated decided to share the name of her new album with the world … lucky us …
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The Rediscovery of a Forgotten Pop Artist: Evelyne Axell (1935–1972)
The Great Journey into Space is the second exhibition of the Belgian Pop artist Evelyne Axell to be seen in New York. Her first New York exhibition, Axell’s Paradise: Last Works (1971–1972) before she vanished, which I reviewed for The Brooklyn Rail (Nov. 2009), was also at 1602 Broadway (October 1–November 21, 2009). (Note: The gallery’s name is different from the address, which is 1181 Broadway, third floor). Together, these exhibitions fill a gap in our knowledge of what was going on during the heyday of Pop Art as well as offer viewers a chance to assess the work of an artist who has largely been left out of art history. An exhibition devoted to the “Erotomobiles” that Axell did between 1964 and 66, at the outset of her rather short career, would fill out the picture.
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Pop Goes the Easel: Roy Lichtenstein’s Retrospective
CHICAGO — The Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is everything a retrospective should be. It takes an incontrovertibly significant artist, assembles art from all phases of his career, includes well-known and less well-known works and tries to make the case for an oeuvre, as opposed to a succession of unconnected objects. If you like Lichtenstein’s work, you will love this show.
Posted inOpinion
MoMA Brings Out a Classic of Remix Culture
Sure there was collage and assemblage before him, but what Pop artist James Rosenquist did in the 1960s is probably closer to our contemporary sensibilities about remix culture with its flattening of disparate images using a similar aesthetic to unify jarring visuals.
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14 Portraits Of Post-Warhol Fame
Andy Warhol’s death left us wondering how the quintessential Pop artist would have reacted, or shaped, a society that fulfilled his prophesy of universal, albeit short-lived, fame. But aside from wondering what the artist would have thought of Rebecca Black, his passing left a hole in New York City Nightlife. Thomas Kiedrowski’s new book “Andy Warhol’s New York City” and a series of new “screen tests” by Conrad Ventur speak to the nostalgia this generation feels for the days of Superstars and silver clouds.