Art
There are condos going up all over Williamsburg, facades decked out with panels of bright colors that bring to mind a sort of yuppie Piet Mondrian: sickly oranges, pea greens and off-reds, all surfaced fiberglass matte and smooth. All those bare walls seen through the under-construction picture wind
Art
An exhibition of LA-educated artists Brody Condon and Jen Liu at Lower East Side gallery On Stellar Rays showcases two different methods of abstraction. Beyond abstracting painting to an ever-flatter surface, artists use their work to flatten visual and symbolic content as well. In the work of Condo
Books
Though the art world seems to have recovered from crisis mode with the enthusiastic approach to (and beginning) of Art Basel Miami Beach 2010, the remnants of our previous recession-driven apocalypse are still close at hand. Auction successes are blazing beacons of money, but seem shaky and could pr
Art
The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century purports to display “the radical transformation of the medium of drawing throughout the twentieth century,” but what the genre retrospective really does is to narrow the definition of “drawing” considerably, limitin
Books
This month's Brooklyn Rail didn't just update me on the critical reception of the past months' art exhibitions, it also kept me well-informed about the state of vegetarian burritos, Indian call centers and the misunderstood G train! The November issue (my copy is elegantly covered in a Jonas Mekas l
Art
Last Sunday's BETA Spaces 2010 didn’t disappoint as we all got what we were looking for. Organized by the all-volunteer organization Arts In Bushwick, BETA Spaces (Bushwick Exhibition Triangle of Alternative Spaces) offered the public a big block party full of art. A truly overwhelming affair with m
Books
It's easy enough to tell that The Believer [http://www.believermag.com/] is a publication from California from looking at the cover of their 2010 Art Issue, much less getting to the table of contents. A 70s psychedelic mashup of art icons, a John Baldessari suited figure, a dinosaur figurine, and a
Art
Yesterday afternoon, I ventured out into the bordering on bad weather and braved the gray skies to bring you the latest on Chelsea this November. The gallery district is probably much as you remember it, with high-end galleries showing off their blue chip stables and smaller spaces skipping to keep
Books
The trek out to PS1 for the 2010 New York Art Book Fair [http://nyartbookfair.com/] took me on the E train to Long Island City, away from Hyperallergic's Williamsburg office. Yet somehow, the population of Williamsburg had followed me there. The concrete colonnade and ramped steps leading up to PS1'
Art
A generic survey of New York’s Lower East Side galleries [http://www.artcat.com/neighborhoods/6], perused at random on the first week of November, 2010, including observations from a viewer completely outside the art world. Jerry Saltz often ridicules artists for not going to see enough shows [http:
Art
Yoshitomo Nara's retrospective Nobody's Fool at Asia Society is what you would get if art museums loosened up and let themselves have some fun. After climbing the institution's glassy modern stairs, what greets visitors isn't a succession of white-walled galleries but a mishmash of wood-walled cubbi
Books
The New Museum's “Free [http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/429/free]” exhibition is based on the freedom of cultural exchange that has followed the advent of the internet and digital technology. Following up on that emphasis on online activity, the exhibition's catalogue is entirely digital as wel