“Living with art, I am surrounded by thoughts, visions and conversations by other artists. It’s all very intimate.”
Richard Artschwager
Posted inArt
Sussing Out Subtlety at the Frieze Art Fairs in London
LONDON — Last year was my first Frieze London fair, and I was baffled that it could seem so desultory, given that it was chock-a-block with pointlessly novel artworks.
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Look Before You Sit: At Frieze New York, the Seats Are All Sculptures
Frieze New York opens its doors to the public today, but already during yesterday’s press and VIP preview the aisles were crowded, the common areas and restaurants filled with worn-out fairgoers, and it seemed as if the only empty seats were sculptures.
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From Calder to Kruger, the New Whitney Museum’s First Show
The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum is not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.
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A Universe of Drawing, Rolled into a Single Room
Ten years ago, the Morgan Library & Museum decided it was time to bring its collection up to speed on the art of drawing in the 20th and 21st centuries — a daunting task in itself, and even more improbable in the face of a superheated, late-capitalist art market: at the feast of the trophy-eaters, would the museum be forced to content itself with scraps?
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Fondation Cartier at 30: Universalized Eclectic Global Art in Forward Motion
PARIS — This is a vision of a universalized eclectic global art in forward motion: a relational aesthetic that seems to hover over many exhibitions in France as a great correctness that cannot be questioned, only tampered with.
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Tom Sachs’s Pointless Americana
PARIS — In a search for art that reacts to the inequalities of globalization, must art lose touch with the sort of grace that exceeds the hand, a grace that couldn’t be anything but artificial and technological?
Posted inOpinion
In Search of Unexpected Design Treasures
I think I’ve admitted this before on Hyperallergic, but I love auctions, they are a guilty pleasure. Not the big ticket auctions that grab all the headlines but the ones where it is still possible to find real treasures.
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In the Desert with Richard Artschwager
“In my beginning is my end.” The first line of T. S. Eliot’s poem “East Coker” — the second of his Four Quartets — came unexpectedly to mind when I returned for a last look at Richard Artschwager’s The Desert, a selection of pastels along with two paintings, at David Nolan Gallery. Artschwager’s mischievousness seems to have slipped into my thinking because I misremembered the line as: “In my end is my beginning.” Did I transpose the words because the artist is nearly ninety, and he began working on landscapes in color around 2007, when he was in his mid-eighties? The subject matter of many of the drawings is beginnings and endings as they are played out through the filters of the artist’s memory and imagination.
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The Right Way to Do It Wrong: Three Takes at the Whitney
Last week the Whitney Museum announced its plan for the 2014 Biennial, which entrusts three curators with organizing the exhibition, but not as collaborators. Rather, each individual will be responsible for a single floor of the museum, dividing it, as chief curator Donna De Salvo told The New York Times, “like a layer cake.” This is a new wrinkle in the history of the Biennial, and director Adam Weinberg deserves credit for finding a new direction to take a show that has hit virtually every point on the compass. I read the announcement on the same day that I viewed the Whitney’s commendable Sinister Pop exhibition, and it occurred to me that the museum was already divided into three interrelated layers — or perhaps it would be more to the point to say three case histories — that offer a particular slant on recent developments in American art: Sinister Pop on floor two, Wade Guyton OS on three and Richard Artschwager! on four.
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Why Irony is Healthy
Are you or have you ever considered becoming a hipster? You better become acquainted with the already-outdated moniker’s attendant signifier first: Irony. You have to eat it. You have to breathe it. You have to put a kitschy magnet of it on your fridge and iron it on to a jacket.