Art
Art for Ordinary People?
BRIGHTON, UK — Under normal circumstances, art doesn't come with a manual. But at a new show in Southwark, London, visitors soon find circumstances are not so normal.
Review
Art
The Great Refusal: Videos Taking on New Queer Aesthetics
CHICAGO — The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics induces a sort of lonely feel, one that falls closer in line with Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, which argues that "the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and
Books
How (Not) to Write Like an Art Critic
CHICAGO — A friend who was in London recently went to see what was on at the Tate Modern, and at the end of his visit he did something I never do: he went into the gift shop and bought something. "I've got something to show you, Philip!" he told me on his return. My heart sank. Was it a set of dinne
Art
A Tag Sale at the Temple of Modernism
There's a garage sale at the Museum of Modern Art, and no, it's not a high-end, designer consignment sale. Martha Rosler's Meta-Monumental Garage Sale is about as real as they come, from the racks of battered shoes to the "great dad" statuettes, and from the worn lingerie to the splattered cookbooks
Art
Gallery Photo Policies Versus the Aura of the Artwork
BRIGHTON, UK — If a picture is worth a thousand words, Nihilistic Optimistic is worth about a million. The new show from Tim Noble and Sue Webster at Blain Southern is super photogenic, and therein may lie its appeal.
Art
Death, Darkness, Alchemy, and Rebirth
I’ve always been attracted to the macabre in art and literature. I have a vivid memory of pronouncing Edgar Allen Poe my favorite author we had read that year in 7th grade; most of my classmates preferred Harper Lee or Mark Twain. While walking through the group exhibition A Wake: Still Lives and Mo
Art
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, W
Art
Superfluous Men Can’t Get No Satisfaction
For all of their “nearly oppressive flawlessness,” Stichbury’s paintings and drawings do not look back to “the repository of classical ideas,” but to a world replete with cosmetic surgery, Photoshop, Facebook, Twitter and reality television, just to name a few of the ways society exhibits new and im
Art
Political Art, Galloping Out of the Past
“The Ozymandias Parade” by Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz has landed in the Pace Gallery like a DIY UFO — a frenzied agitprop vessel clattering into the 21st century from the Reagan era’s heart of darkness.
Art
Is Mark Bradford the Best Painter in America?
I didn’t expect to write about the new show from Mark Bradford, who has been called by Guy Trebay of The New York Times “if not the best painter working in America today then certainly the tallest,” when I walked into Sikkema Jenkins on Tuesday morning. Despite the whimsy of Trebay’s “best/tallest”
Art
Small Town Gay Community
CHICAGO — Johannesburg-based South African artist Sabelo Mlangeni's photographs depict a celebratory, positive, and campy-funny queer life in the countryside.
Art
Being Odie in a Garfield World
LOS ANGELES — Audaciously exuberant, Odie, the lovable dog from Jim Davis’s Garfield comics, was a yellow-furred dream come true for any child of the 1980s. It was also, interestingly, artist Jim Drain’s emotional North Star when it came to his latest solo exhibition, Drain Expressions, at Los Angel