Essays & Reviews
Art & Dance
Biennials are a strange thing by their nature. Meant to represent the cream of the artistic crop, these biannual events offer an implicit promise for both artistic excellence (however one chooses to define that these days) and sharp social commentary. In this way the art displayed at a biennial serves a dual purpose: to assure highbrow connoisseurs that quality fine art is still being produced, and at the same time to reflect the zeitgeist. This zeitgeist does not belong to the rarified air of the New York art world, however, or the downtown scenesters sipping wine out of plastic cups in the antiseptic spaces of Chelsea art galleries. The zeitgeist is messy. It consists of violent video games, mass shootings, mind-boggling inequality, opiate addiction, racial tension, social media, and a consumer economy based on cheap labor, disposable products, and omnipresent advertising. In other words, it is about as far from 19th century French impressionism as one could possibly get.
On the occasion of “Too Late: the European Can(n)on is Here,” their second dual exhibition together at Shoestring Press, artists Lane Sell and Phil Rabovsky sat down with curator Madeleine Boucher in a tiny Brooklyn living room over no small amount of whiskey.
Medrie MacPhee’s newest paintings are made from the shapes and contours of disassembled garments, giving “pattern painting” an entirely new meaning.
Currently on view are exhibits featuring the work of Irving Penn and Rei Kawakubo for fashion house, Comme des Garçons. I went to view both spectacles in the same day and saw Irving Penn’s photographs first. This retrospective of Penn’s work is the largest to date and celebrates the centennial of the artist’s birth.
“It’s not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,” says artist Hannah Black.
If you looked down from the sky or had an aerial view of the Memorial ACTe (Caribbean Centre for the Expressions and Memory of African Slave Trade & Slavery), the new memorial museum that opened in Guadeloupe in 2015
The first thing I did after seeing Kerry James Marshall’s monumental paintings at the Met Breuer last week is to go home and read. I’ve been reading everyday since. I could give a lot of reasons for reading: I could list what I’ve been reading and that may help me to answer the reasons.
Nobody likes to talk about it, but the history of modern art is inextricably tied to the history of modern wealth and money.
Historical montages, genre paintings, hidden symbols, landscape themes, religious undertones, racial subjects, murals, glitter, comic books, mixed media and a plethora of the black figures, merely touches upon what encompasses the Kerry James Marshall: Mastry Exhibition at the Met Breuer.
On a Tuesday afternoon, James Fuentes revels in an empty office. “It is what I’m used to,” the art dealer says, before catching himself. “Of course, I like it when everyone is here, too.”
Tribes new and old art work!
I don’t recall the year nor the subject of my first critical text. Most likely it was a movie review slapped together for the high school paper I started (and was summarily barred from contributing to by my handlers—teachers, administration, counselors, etc.—in retaliation for my satire of the local, small town New England PD)
Hudson, NY – 510 Warren Street Gallery is happy to be exhibiting the work of George Spencer in a show titled “Old Forms, New Uses” beginning on January 6th and continuing until January 29th. Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, January 7th from 3 to 6 pm.
Since its inception, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City has always been an inherently tricky location in which to hold an artist’s career retrospective. The building’s ascendant design almost imposes a linear narrative.
On the surface, it feels as though it would be difficult to draw parallels between the works of artists Kerry James Marshall and Agnes Martin. Marshall, whose 35 year retrospective “Mastery” is being mounted with powerful effect at the Met-Brauer, frequently uses a collage style of composition that is at once disarmingly simplistic in appearance and “masterfully” executed to offer up his perspective on the black experience in America.
Carrie Mae Weems' solo at Jack Shainman gallery is exactly the show we need this fall. Her unflinchingness, and her explorations of what haunts and what is bound to haunt, ask complicated questions about representation, memory, and how to witness.
Dave Hickey is a noted art critic, author of "Air Guitar," and is Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.