Art
Walking Into the Matrix on Park Avenue
Entering Japanese artist/composer Ryoji Ikeda’s new installation "the transfinite," which is currently showing at the Park Avenue Armory, feels like sitting inside of a computer.
Reviews
Art
Wandering Through Bushwick Open Studios
Never have I been so happy to see a portrait of Betty White. After three trains and two shuttles, and a few failed attempts to get a taxi, I was finally in Bushwick for the 2011 Open Studios.
Art
Dark and Stormy at Storefront Gallery
Dunkle Wolke is a show at Storefront Gallery in Bushwick curated by William Powhida, our favorite art world curmudgeon. The title translates to “dark cloud,” a perfect match for the small exhibition's mood, a mixture of bookish depression, modernist angst and goth vibes.
Art
First Look at the Surrealism Show at Factory Fresh
Yesterday, I convinced curators Ali Ha and Jason Andrew to give me a peak at the Surrealism show that opens tonight at Factory Fresh as part of the 2011 Bushwick Open Studios.
Art
Cory Arcangel's (Al)ready-mades
Remember Oakley M-Frame sunglasses? They’re supposed to look like the future, with gradient lenses in a variety of neon colors and knotted frames that bear a resemblance to tensed muscle and ligaments. What they actually look like is a future imagined from the 1980s, in which some mixture of cyberpu
Art
Alexander McQueen's Sartorial Savagery
What becomes a legend most? How are those cultural superstars chosen, the ones whose very names invoke awe, wonder, or at least a gasp? Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the comprehensive retrospective of the late designer’s ravishing raiment now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art certainly p
Art
Oklahoma Art Is OK!
Ever since I moved to New York, I’ve been telling people that great contemporary art is coming out of my homestate of Oklahoma. Benrimon Contemporary in Chelsea is finally bringing some evidence to New York in the group show Red Country Pictures. The exhibit focuses on one particularly influential l
Art
A Perceptual Dance Party for Your Eyes
Abstraction is a fickle shapeshifter. Outlines of horses and bulls in caves and geometric markings on ceramic flatware were the earliest embodiment of the craft. Since then, abstraction has travelled through an unbelievable number of incarnations. James McCoy Gallery recently took on the challenge o
Art
Under Construction at Parker's Box
If contemporary art remains far too removed from daily life for some people, Briac Leprêtre's Like It Is exhibition at Parker's Box makes the case for exactly the opposite. On the walls of the Williamsburg gallery viewers encounter carefully constructed watercolors of unfinished domestic interiors a
Art
Surviving AIDS
The most visceral pieces in Brooklyn-based artist and activist Hunter Reynolds’ solo show Survival AIDS at Lower East Side nonprofit art space Participant Inc. are not, as one might expect, the blood splattered newspaper clippings screaming ominous headlines posted on the walls of the gallery. Rathe
Art
Has Werner Herzog Made the First Art Stoner Flick in 3D?
Director and filmmaker, Werner Herzog’s latest, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is a strange mix of flighty pseudo-intellectual reverie and jaw-dropping documentary. Filmed in the famously inaccessible Chauvet Cave in southern France with 3-D enhancement, and sprinkled with the usual eccentric Hertzogian
Books
Digging Into Ai Weiwei's Online Diary
Reading through detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s blog, recently translated by Lee Ambrozy and published as an eponymous book by MIT Press, isn’t fun, and it’s not for the faint of heart. A carefully selected culling of the artist’s massive production of posts between 2006 and 2009, the volume is