Opinion
Weekend Words: Crash
Weekend Words looks at crashes past with an eye toward a crash-free future.
Weekend
Art
Brave Heart: The Recent Paintings and Drawings of Mark Greenwold
Ever since Mark Greenwold first began exhibiting in 1979, a lot of gibberish has been written about his highly detailed, modestly scaled oil paintings of disquieting domestic situations. One critic, willfully forgetting that there is a difference between fact and fiction, viciously attacked his firs
Art
Thomas Nozkowski and Philip Guston Talk to Each Other Without Knowing It
Thomas Nozkowski wasn’t thinking about Philip Guston’s “Untitled” (1980) while he was working on “Untitled (9-21)” (2012), but the number of formal attributes they share — from size to composition and imagery — has proven hard for me to ignore. It was while I was looking at Nozkowski’s “Untitled (9-
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Julie Heffernan
I met Julie Heffernan this past fall at a party she hosted celebrating the wedding of another painter, and was taken by her, the community of (women) artists who were gathered, and her painting over the dining table. It was the fierceness of the vision that attracted me, and the individuality of her
Books
Luminous Loss: Karen Green's "Bough Down"
At the start of Karen Green’s prismatic first book, Bough Down, it is June. “Does it begin like this?” she writes, and describes in glittering prose a pastoral arrangement of household objects: garden hose, cigarettes, fuzzy pills, artichoke stalks. The items seem innocent enough until they become i
Art
Bridge to Nowhere: Matthew Barney’s Drawings
The elaborately baroque art of Matthew Barney puts some people off, and I count myself among them. His Olympian athleticism, symbol-laden costume dramas and obsession with petroleum jelly can be fascinating, but they can also feel chilly and remote.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Fujimoto's Serpentine Pavilion is unveiled, expect more Flavins in the world, David Foster Wallace on a crisis in America, unpaid internships and privilege, Peter Zumthor's proposal for LA, book covers as gendered spaces, the Hirshhorn Museum's bubble pops, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Shrink
Nowadays all of the world’s knowledge, or at least enough to fill an encyclopedia, can fit onto a flash drive. Weekend Words feels the pinch as the world shrinks further.
Art
George Sugarman’s Unrecognized Greatness
I am tired of critics characterizing George Sugarman (1912–1999) — whose work was either overlooked or marginalized during his lifetime — as an idiosyncratic sculptor. By labeling him in this way, they are able to suggest that the neglect was partially his own doing, and to imply that he wasn’t inte
Art
Why Jeff Koons Made Michael Jackson White
I still remember the ripples of titillation — occasionally marked by muffled, satisfied guffaws — that spread predictably through the art world when Jeff Koons first exhibited his shiny white and gold porcelain sculpture, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988) at Sonnabend in 1989. The sculpture was p
Books
Reading the "Nothings that Are": Craig Dworkin's "No Medium"
“In No Medium Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent … point[ing] to a new understanding of media.” So goes the back cover copy of the author’s new book, which was released in March by MIT Press. This paratextual statement, while certainly catchy, is a bit misleading r
Art
Wishing Upon a Star: Dan Colen’s Escapist Fantasies
The spirits that I called at Oko is Dan Colen’s first solo exhibition in New York City since his disastrous Gagosian show in 2010.