Thursday, August 25 2011
When Art Is Illegal (Or Not)
Graffiti is, as Norman Mailer famously described it, "Your presence on their Presence... hanging your alias on their scene."
Wednesday, August 24 2011
The Museum of Modern Art Highlights ‘Images of War (At a Distance)’
Visual artist Harun Farocki's MoMA installation fuses images of war and violence with the documentary mode to create a bold, confrontational hybrid.
Thursday, October 29 2009
Wonder: The Photos of Stephanie Chernikowski
Chernikowski's 35mm black-and-white stills (a sampling of which is included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Looking at Music: Side 2 exhibit this fall) exude more than just an appreciation for the magnetic personalities they capture, but also a sense of discovery.
Thursday, September 24 2009
Bob Norman Ross: Teacher, Painter, Optimist (October 29, 1942 – July 4, 1995)
His way of gently exhorting the view at home to “be brave” when they were deciding what to do first, to not be afraid of that terrifying gulf that confronts every artist when you can do anything or nothing was peacefully encouraging.
Thursday, July 30 2009
It’s All Too Beautiful
A suspicion of beauty is vital if one hopes to have any relation to it that isn't completely compromised; as Walter Benjamin said, beauty is the other side of the coin of injustice.
Thursday, May 14 2009
Art and Appropriation
Using trash to make art is a political statement, though not necessarily the one the artists may intend. The implicit message, reduce and reuse, runs counter to the consumerist impulse to always buy more.
Wednesday, April 8 2009
What We Write About When We Write About Art
On Edge exhibits a composite image of a younger, rougher New York: we know it existed, but it still has the power to shock and charm, like a photo of a beloved aunt as a teenager with cropped and blue hair.
Tuesday, March 10 2009
Punk Invades the Auction House
There were no shocking sales at the first-ever Christie's auction of punk and rock posters, but plenty of surprisingly good deals
Thursday, January 29 2009
‘Art’: A Diminished Magnificence
Has any other art, even literature or music, ever exceeded the visual arts in its ambition, its richness, and its sheer beauty?
Thursday, January 22 2009
Street Art’s Day in the Sun
In many ways Sheppard Fairey’s (designer of the famous Obama "hope" poster) work is an ad campaign making fun of ad campaigns. It’s his consistency of message that has earned him respect. He is the McDonalds of guerilla art.
Wednesday, January 21 2009
Linden Frederick and the Magic of Realism
There is a love in Linden Frederick's paintings – a love for, in the broadest sense, civilization and, in the narrowest sense, for the virtues of merely hanging in there.
Friday, December 12 2008
Hong Kong Graffiti: Not for Lack of Inspiration
Subversive commentary should be thriving in Hong Kong. All the ingredients to spark graffiti are there -- the divides in social class, the thriving materialistic culture, and political antagonism with Mainland China.
Tuesday, November 25 2008
The ‘Murderous’ Art of George Baselitz
For Baselitz, the true artist is the eternal outsider. While he leads a good bourgeois family life, at his art he becomes a murderer, a man on the fringes of good society, a destroyer.
Monday, November 10 2008
Hung Up: The State of Rock Poster Art
With major labels fading and promotional budgets cut to the bone, can rock-concert poster art survive? Can it even thrive?
Wednesday, October 15 2008
Bruce Nauman and The Art of Thinking
In Bruce Nauman's art no complacency is allowed to reside. The complacent can only flee.
Wednesday, October 8 2008
(Super)flat Pop
Despite sharing a preoccupation with pop culture and commercialism, Takashi Murakami is no Andy Warhol.
Monday, September 15 2008
Jokerman Meets Mad Man
Bob Dylan helped change the way the 1960s sounded; advertising icon George Lois changed the way it looked. It's only fitting that their paths have crossed several times since
Friday, June 13 2008
Flying Alone: Edward Hopper and America’s Night Side
Isolation is more than being alone. That is why the greatest and most discomforting presentation of isolation can be found in Hopper's paintings that include more than one person.
Wednesday, April 2 2008
Thaw: Russian Art from Glasnost to the Present
Fears and rumors of increasing state control insinuate that the most recent Russian thaw, as represented at this exhibit at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, might turn out to be just that: a limited period of freedom.
Tuesday, March 11 2008
Identity Thief: “There’s Banksy”
If people knew who he was, if they could point and whisper, “There’s Banksy” as he gingerly squeezed tomatoes at his local supermarket, would his art lose its power?
