It takes only one Academy Award for critics to claim a resurgence of genre, and when The Artist won the 2012 Oscar for Best Picture, it was heralded as signaling the return of an interest in black-and-white silent film. Blancanieves, the latest film from Spanish director Pablo Berger (Torremolinos 73) would seem to be a continuation of that (rather small) trend — except Berger’s film was already in production at the time of The Artist’s release. Rather than owing its creation to The Artist’s success, then, Blancanieves points to a simultaneous, transoceanic interest in black-and-white silent film, outside of the usual film-school experiments.
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Posted inBooks
Grafting Graffiti Style Onto Skin
Graffiti and tattoos seem like total opposities. One is ephemeral, lasting only until it’s painted over by the city or other writers, the other is forever, or at least unless you decide to rip the ink back out of your skin. Yet there’s been abundant crossover in the aesthetic style, but what’s more interesting is graffiti writers who have moved to tattooing as their main focus.
Posted inArt
Tilting at Windmills: Joe Zucker as Don Quixote
Joe Zucker is the most inventive artist of his generation, which includes Elizabeth Murray, Mel Bochner, Joan Snyder and his longtime friend, Chuck Close, and perhaps the most misunderstood. One reason for the confusion is that reviewers have often focused on Zucker’s inventiveness with materials and processes without recognizing that they are inseparable from the work’s content. He is far more than an idiosyncratic formalist.
Posted inMusic
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (April 2013, Part 1)
I’ve talked about Michael Tatum before, but that Kitty song compels me to cite this marvelous Tatum sentence, about Skrillex: “…any hairstyle that resembles a palomino’s hindquarters when viewed from an elevated height commits cosmetological crimes so outrageously grotesque they could send Korn’s Jonathan Davis into a raging fit of trichotillomania.” I mean, that is why I love the English language.
Posted inArt
The Writing on the Wall, the Paintings in the Basement
It’s not uncommon for artists to fall short of their own expectations, only for the public to find delight in the charged gap between the aspiration and the goal.
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The Almost Anonymous of the Digital Art World
Remove Justin Bieber from your internet. Slice up subway posters for easy remixing. Mix LEGO, K’nex, and Lincoln Logs in an incestuous scramble of childhood toys. Star in your own guerrilla TED talk. Those are just a brief excerpt of the mischievous things an active viewer can accomplish at Eyebeam’s retrospective of the hacker-internet artist-new media graffiti collective F.A.T. Lab.
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Countdown to Abu Dhabi Begins in Paris
The next few years are going to have the art world’s focus zooming in more and more on West Asia, or at least that’s the expectation of mammoth museums like the Louvre and Guggenheim which both plan to open shiny new outposts in Abu Dhabi. As something of a lead up to this era of eastern art expansion, Walid Raad is collaborating with the Louvre on a project taking place over three years, which began with the opening of the Louvre’s new wing for Islamic Arts in Paris and will continue to their opening in Abu Dhabi in 2015.
Posted inArt
Warhol in Northern Ireland
BRIGHTON, UK — Warhol’s old mantra, “I think everybody should like everybody,” has been endowed with fresh significance in Belfast, where his first show ever to take place North of Ireland’s contentious border is now underway at the Metropolitan Arts Centre.
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Petrella’s Imports Revives the Lost Individuality of NYC Newsstands
Newsstands as these highly individual, cluttered points of information in a personal dialogue with the street have almost totally disappeared from New York City. A huge reason was the raising of annual vendor fees from the hundreds to the thousands in the 1990s, and the replacing of the old booths that reflected the characters who maintained them with new, uniform glass and metal boxes. One of these old newsstands was Petrella’s Point run by Adam Petrella for 30 years at Bowery and Canal Street, and although it was removed in 2004, this past weekend an artist-run newsstand popped-up to bring back its spirit.
Posted inArt
An Italian Duke Visits the Met
The Met has dedicated an entire room to a prized portrait painted by Diego Velázquez titled “Duke Francesco I d’Este” (1638), on loan from the Galleria Estense in Modena, Italy.
Posted inArt
Lines of Spontaneous Jagged Contours
One could say that paying attention to the minutiae of an artwork is often necessary to digesting and understanding it. Where would we be today if viewers overlooked the borders of Piet Mondrian’s paintings? Indeed, it is with a subtle eye that Judith Braun’s most recent exhibition at Joe Sheftel Gallery should be viewed.
Posted inArt
Oddly Warped and Genuinely Thrilling Paintings
The new paintings of Andrew Masullo, now at Mary Boone Gallery in conjunction with Feature Inc., outwit, defy, and make gallery-going fun again.
