In an attempt to answer the age-old question — Is it art or home decor? — I perused the halls of Art Basel Miami to see how galleries are serving the lifestyle needs of the rich and famous.
Reviews
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Last Night at Wynwood Walls: Fairey, Stelios Faitakis, Los Gêmeos, Swoon & Sissy Bounce
Outside of the major art fairs there’s dozens of other art things to see and do in Miami, including Wynwood Walls, which featured a bootilicious Sissy Bounce performance, art by Fairey, Swoon, Stelios Faitakis, Los Gêmeos, and more.
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Art Burn Report
If looking at art is fun, watching it burn is great. There’s something cathartic about attending an event dedicated to the destruction of art in the middle of the world’s largest art fair bacchanalia.
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Just Say No: Santiago Sierra Takes Manhattan
What happens when in the name of art you ride through Manhattan in a truck hauling ginormous letters that spell the word NO? Lyra finds out.
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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Recently on Hyperallergic, An Xiao’s “Cover Art, or Vito Acconci Gets a Follow Back,” made the case for artists who choose to directly reference or re-stage existing artworks. She draws a comparison between derivative works and cover songs. This may be an apt comparison, but she glosses over an important fact: most cover songs are terrible.
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Cover Art, or Vito Acconci Gets a Follow Back
An Xiao organized a 40th Anniversary tribute to Vito Acconci’s “Following Piece” (1969) for @Platea, the social media art collective she performs with. She likes to call what she did a form of “cover art” and she explains why.
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Brent Owens Gets a Woody at English Kills
Daniel Larkin reflects on Brent Owens’s solo show Gnastic Pursuits, which took place earlier this fall at the English Kills Art Gallery in Brooklyn. Describing his work, Larkin writes, “Owens likewise takes the rich tradition of wood carving and melds it with that millennial taste for biting wit and quirks of fate.”
Posted inBooks
A Review of “Artist/Artshow: Inside Contemporary Artshow Culture”
Artist/Artshow is an image-heavy book produced this year by AllRightsReserved, a self-described creative studio based in Hong Kong that seeks to publish high-quality texts which explore issues related to the visual arts. You’ll love the pictures but …
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The US President That Just Won’t Go Away: Reaganography
Artist Kevin Regan grew up in a family of Reagan Democrats. Today, he continues to be plagued by Reagan, and he uses the image of our 40th President in his own personal art. To amplify the trauma, we asked Kevin to visit a recent exhibition titled Reaganography and report on what he saw.
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Everything But a Unicorn: Jack Early’s ‘Ear Candy’
Jack Early has turned over a new leaf. Accused of racism in the early 1990s for an installation he created with then-partner Rob Pruitt (and recently recreated at the Tate Modern for their “Pop Life” exhibition), Early fell from grace, spent many years underground, and now has reemerged with a striking exhibition at Williamsburg’s Southfirst gallery.
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The 18th C. Food Pornographer at LACMA
Two weeks ago, I found myself in Los Angeles with an afternoon to kill. I ventured to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and stumbled across a small exhibition by 18th C. Spanish still life painter Luis Meléndez. The exhibition, titled “Master of the Spanish Still Life,” was a quaint two-room show decked out with bizarre gray stucco walls treated with a ragging technique that made it look like a display at a suburban home furnishings shop. Faux finishes aside, what immediately struck me as I perused the canvases were two works in particular that I would characterize as Rococo food porn — they were pretty hot.
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Surveillance vs. Sousveillance
In his latest edition of Hypermedia, artist Artie Vierkant explores ideas of surveillance and sousveillance in the work of artists Jill Magid, Steve Mann, Josh On, Ryan McKinley, and Trevor Paglen.
