(Visual Art, Washington DC) Artomatic, which sounds like a thin slice of madness – more on that in a bit – went away three years ago for some reason or other; odds are it was just laying back and marshaling its resources, because now it’s back, and whoa, strap in for this one. ...more...
Art News
Richard Prince Copyright-Infringement Case Goes to Appeal
May 17, 2012
(Visual Art, National) So Richard Prince got himself into a little trouble a couple of years ago over his use of photographs from Patrick Cariou’s book Yes Rasta. ...more...
Lots of Chairs at the Tampa Museum of Art
May 17, 2012
(Visual Art, Tampa) Consider the humble chair. What does it want? What are the chair’s fundamental desires? ...more...
‘A Different Kind of Normal’ Takes a Look at Asperger’s
May 17, 2012
(Visual Art, Portland, OR) For whatever reason, or combination of reasons – and theories abound – diagnoses of autism and its less-crippling cousin, Asperger’s Syndrome, have increased remarkably in recent years. ...more...
Chihuly’s Sets Add Glitter to Seattle Symphony’s ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’
May 16, 2012
(Visual Art, Classical Music, Seattle) Bluebeard’s Castle is one of Bela Bartok’s masterpieces, and that barely matters in this case. ...more...
Selections from the Blaisten Collection Will Spend the Summer at the Meadows
May 16, 2012
(Visual Art, Dallas) Andres Blaisten knew what he liked, and what he liked was paintings. Specifically, paintings by Mexican artists that date from the first half of the 20th Century. ...more...
Nudes and Neon in Reno
May 16, 2012
(Visual Art, Reno) If you ever find yourself needing evidence that America began as – and, for the most part, remains – a Puritan country, look no further than our collective societal attitude toward the human body. ...more...
Artist Sits in Box. Community Watches. Revelations Occur.
May 15, 2012
(Visual Art, Dallas) Probably since the time in 1962 Yves Klein traded “immaterial space” for gold leaf – and then threw lots of that gold leaf into the Seine – performance art has inspired controversy, of one form or another. ...more...
Tom Sachs Is Going To the Park Avenue Armory, And Then Mars
May 14, 2012
(Visual Art, New York) Things are, presumably, fairly sad at NASA right now; all the space shuttles have taken their final rides and are now installed in their permanent, last resting places; funding for further manned missions has dried up because America, as a country, has no money at all anymore, anywhere, if you are not Mark Zuckerberg or that guy who runs Zynga, and besides, there’s nothing fun about going into space anymore because where are we supposed to go, back to the Moon? ...more...
The Mike Kelley ‘Mobile Homestead’ Will Happen
May 14, 2012
(Visual Art, Detroit) Mike Kelley took his own life, apparently, in January of this year, and regardless of the finality of that act for Kelley personally, it also threw into flux Kelley’s planned Mobile Homestead, a project planned in conjunction with the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art that sought to replicate Kelley’s childhood home in as precise a fashion as possible – exact dimensions, exact furnishings, that sort of thing. ...more...
Needing Something More to Occupy His Time, James Franco Curates a James Dean Tribute at L.A. MOCA
May 14, 2012
(Visual Art, Los Angeles/Orange County) Not content to be our nation’s repository of all things meta and self-referential, while simultaneously studying at six different universities and playing himself/not-himself on General Hospital, James Franco… ...more...
A Cloud City Goes Up on the Roof of the Met
May 11, 2012
(Visual Art, New York) It’s getting near summer – by the calendar, at least; the weather’s not there yet, but it will be, presumably – which means that the Met is once again hauling a big sculpture up to its roof. ...more...
FEP, M.I.T. Look to Preserve the Polaroid, Might Want Your Pics
May 10, 2012
(Visual Art, National) Right now, the St. Louis Museum of Art has mounted a new retrospective of Andy Warhol’s Polaroids, and in some curious way it feels like the obsolete medium is having another small moment in the sun. ...more...
Laurie Anderson is EMPAC’s First Artist-in-Residence
May 10, 2012
(Classical Music, Visual Art, Albany) Laurie Anderson was NASA’s first artist-in-residence, in 2003, which made a lot of people very, very angry – not because it was Laurie Anderson but because why does NASA have an artist-in-residence, exactly? – and seems destined to never happen again. ...more...
A Year after McQueen, Met Tries Prada/Schiaparelli On for Size
May 8, 2012
(Visual Art, New York) Lots of people are still talking about that Alexander McQueen show, Savage Beauty, which opened at the Met just about exactly a year ago and kept going. ...more...
New Kennedy Center Festival Is Dedicated To Street Art
May 8, 2012
(Visual Art, Washington DC) The Kennedy Center does great work, but it’s not really a stretch to say that most of what gets offered there is not exactly on the cutting edge. Which is fine, because a lot of the time the cutting edge is a dangerous and unsavory place to be, although it’s often colorful and cheap out there, too. ...more...
This Marina Abramovic Center is Going to Be Very Interesting
May 7, 2012
(Visual Art, New York) Just to get you up to speed really quickly: Marina Abramovic pretty much set fire to the New York art world in 2010 with The Artist is Present, in which Abramovic sat in a chair at MoMA, and then people would sit in the opposite chair and stare at her. ...more...
Clowes’ Exhibit at the Oakland Museum is a Victory for Comic Artists Everywhere
May 7, 2012
(Visual Art, Oakland) That actually might be a slight exaggeration; in lots of ways, Clowes’ work is sort of sui generis, so maybe it’s just a victory for him. But what the hell, he’s great. ...more...
‘Occupy’ the Spencer Museum? Sort of.
May 4, 2012
(Visual Art, Kansas City) At first glance, it looks like KU’s Spencer Museum of Art has, in fact, been taken over by the forces of “Occupy Everything and Damn the Man, etc.” ...more...
“Warhol’s Polaroids” in St. Louis
May 3, 2012
(Art Museums, St. Louis) Andy Warhol didn’t sketch. Andy Warhol threw armloads of stuff into boxes, sealed them, and stored them without a second thought about what was in them, yes, and made odd experimental films about sleep and the Empire State Building and haircuts, yes, and threw happenings like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, oh yes, but he didn’t sketch, at least not with pencil or pen. ...more...
Big Street Art Project in New Orleans Inspired by Former Saint Steve Gleason
May 2, 2012
(Visual Art, New Orleans) Steve Gleason’s name is still said with reverence and affection by Saints fans; Gleason was the point man on one of the most important plays in Saints history, a blocked punt that was returned for a touchdown in the first game back in the Superdome after Katrina, whereupon the Saints stomped the Michael Vick-led Falcons and went on a run that ended in the NFC Championship Game, by far the most successful season to that point in franchise history. ...more...
Pollock and Orozco at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum
May 2, 2012
(Visual Art, Hanover, NH) Before Jackson Pollock was “The Dripper”, he was – well, not nearly as legendary. Just another artist plugging away, one doing some extraordinary and intriguing things with the nature of structure, yes, but, you know, he hadn’t “cracked it wide open.” (Bad line. Good movie, though.) ...more...
Student Work This Month at Detroit Institute of Arts
May 2, 2012
(Visual Art, Detroit) Arts funding is being slashed everywhere, echoing and fueling the emergent narrative that America has somehow become too dependent on things which are viewed as fun, like learning to paint, as opposed to things that are deemed less fun, like, I don’t know, learning how to build bridges or make chemicals, which are things that are not fun at all, uh-uh, no way. ...more...
Naughty Little ‘Birds’ at the New Museum
May 2, 2012
(Visual Art, New York) Ever had a bird fly into your house, or apartment, or duplex or whatever? It comes in, flaps around frantically, loses all control of its digestive tract, looking for all the world like it wants nothing more than a way out of your home and back into the wide wild blue? WRONG. ...more...
Exposition Light Rail Threatens Bergamot Station Arts Center
April 30, 2012
(Visual Art, Santa Monica) The good news is that the Exposition Light Rail will connect L.A. with Santa Monica and, in some measure, presumably, reduce gridlock/pollution/reliance on fossil fuels/etc./and so forth. ...more...
