Yoko Ono is usually a bit much for me: I find things like smile apps and instruction pieces that tell you to “Make a wish” and “Keep wishing” cloyingly precious. (Maybe I’m just a cranky, cynical New Yorker.) But Ono has a new video called “Make-Up Tips for Men” (made as part of her clothing line for Opening Ceremony) that I actually adore, precisely because it cuts the sweetness with camp.
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MoMA Curator Paola Antonelli Appears on Colbert Report to Talk Design
How well designed is your coffee mug? Our personal design heroine and all-time curator crush Paola Antonelli appeared on the Colbert Report last night to critique all those everyday objects we take for granted in advance of her next big show at the Museum of Modern Art.
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Hilarious Portlandia Episode Shows the Dangers of Conceptual Art
For those uninitiated into its history, conceptual art can often seem like a trick — is that really a urinal in an art gallery? Is sticking yogurt caps on gallery walls really great art? Unfortunately for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the stars and creators of the sketch TV show Portlandia, it turns out that conceptual art can actually trap you, even outside of a gallery opening.
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Steve McQueen at the Art Institute of Chicago or How To Install Moving Images
At the Art Institute of Chicago’s Steve McQueen exhibition, I saw something unusual: museum-goers spending time — minutes of it! — watching moving images. In an otherwise bustling museum, the visitors in these rooms were silent and enthralled.
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Watch Jean Cocteau’s Nightmarish First Feature Film
Inveterate surrealist and playwright, artist, and writer polymath Jean Cocteau said that his first film, The Blood of a Poet (1929), wasn’t a work of surrealism — he wanted to “avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious.” But, I have to say, it’s pretty surreal.
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VIDEO: Ai Weiwei Goes Gangnam Style
With this one, the title pretty much says it all. Ai Weiwei’s entire studio has participated in a remake of South Korean rapper PSY’s epic global pop hit “Gangnam Style.”
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Grayson Perry’s Ceramic Dog: “Conceptual Art Is Shit”
Grayson Perry is a cross-dressing British ceramic artist. Bob and Roberta Smith is a single artist who goes by a double name that also functions as an inside joke. Two of the weirder personalities in the contemporary art world, they come together in this video, in which a small sculpture of a dog proudly proclaims, “Conceptual art is shit.”
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William Eggleston Comes Back to New Orleans (Prospect 2 Spotlight)
NEW ORLEANS – Prospect 2 isn’t just about the new or the conceptual or the overwrought: William Eggleston brings a pair of several decades-old works to his Prospect installation at the Old US Mint on the edge of the French Quarter, and together they offer the most satisfying viewing experience of anything I’ve seen so far in this edition of the biennial.
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Anthony Goicolea’s Slowly Approaching Apocalypse
The vibe of Anthony Goicolea’s first traveling museum solo show is a slow melancholy. Looking at the photos, videos, paintings and installation in Alter-Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia made me sink slowly into thoughts of living with apocalypse. Goicolea’s work envisions apocalypse not as an abrupt event followed by an aftermath, but as a slow and definitive ruin that continues throughout life.
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Do You Know What It Means To Dream About New Orleans?
By the ordinary way of reckoning such things, there are considerably fewer artists participating in this year’s Prospect.2 biennial in New Orleans than in the event’s first iteration three years ago. But if artist and provocateur William Pope.L’s piece for the exhibition turns out according to schedule, there will be a lot more artistic visions on view around New Orleans this fall than the smaller number of artists might lead you to expect.
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James Franco Tries To Make Non-Visible Art More Visible, Even on TV
Thought that James Franco’s recent apparent breakup with art BFF Kalup Linzy meant that you wouldn’t be seeing quite as much of his grinning disembodied mug around as you have been during the last twelve months or so? Guess again!
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Planking Around The French Quarter
As geopsychically wondrous as New Orleans is, it’s not exactly the most cutting edge of places; in fact, even in these days of instantaneous communication it sometimes takes ideas and trends a little longer to make their way down here than they do elsewhere. But although we might not be au courant, we do do things down here with a certain kind of panache.
