People want to have a new sense of voyeurism, they want a new level. This is something I’m really interested in. We still don’t know how this is going to grow or pop, but we know it isn’t going away. This is very important to me—I want to be in the middle of this. These other people have cracked something fundamental, and that’s what we’re looking for. We want to crack something fundamental. More…
The come-on “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” applies equally to memory as to sexual license: the city as black hole, our experience entirely forgettable. Those promoters that don’t temper their praise—such as art critic Dave Hickey, who advocated for Las Vegas artists and the free-market sensibility the city engendered—wind up with their predictions inevitably burst. More…
Post-critical: We made ourselves so familiar with the past, learned so much about its modes and movements, diligently collected and studied its images, that it made sense, this persistent desire to be judged as if from the omniscient future. We loved the past, and this (always-postponed) ideal critique would finally allow us to merge with it. More…
Paper Monument‘s third issue is here! Dan Fox of Frieze says it’s “not all wry satirical sketches about the lives of young, full-sleeve-tattooed middle class MFA grads.” In fact, it’s much more! Bad behavior in nice museums, total immersion sculpture, Britain’s art empire. Travels with Dana Hoey, Matt Mullican under hypnosis, Corinna Schnitt’s minimalist films. Order now and be contemporary with contemporary art. More…
The objects didn’t literally speak, but they always started conversations—down at the pub, in the cafeteria at the Courtauld, even the one our visitor was having now, in his head. The Victorian idea of a conversation piece had been reborn as an artwork that promoted itself. This was happening all over, but it occurred with a special fervor and skill in London, which didn’t seem coincidental to our visitor. More…
A problem for Tino Sehgal as much as it was a problem for Plato is that performed conversation is still performance as much as it’s conversation. It’s one thing to perceive the stark whiteness and vertiginous openness of the Guggenheim as an ideal contemporary representation of the Athenian “agora,” and another to allow “the art of conversation” to take place unimpeded. More…
It was at a conference some twenty-eight years ago, just before the moderator’s opening remarks, that the Rome-born architect and theorist Bruno Zevi pushed back from the roundtable and rose from his seat to declare, “I denounce the presence at this symposium of the fascist Philip Johnson.” The audience members shifted nervously in their chairs. More…
Artists must first of all distinguish themselves from members of the adjacent professional classes typically present at art world events: dealers, critics, curators, and caterers. They must second of all take care not to look like artists. This double negation founds the generative logic of artists’ fashion. More…
The problem that Shephard Fairey presents also leads to a fear: that he may be, in fact, the perfect portraitist to render Obama. The purveyor of radical aesthetics is rendering the visage of radical hope—neither of whom is very radical. His work is an instant exposure of all we might hope for from Obama, and all that we stand to lose. More…
Like ants in a colony, the men and women in town for Fashion Week have thin black exoskeletons, specialized social functions and valuable cargo to transport. A swarm of these people has formed on a September afternoon in front of the West Village showroom where Z Zegna will exhibit its Spring-Summer 2009 collection. An invitation to the show is sandwiched between two candy bars in my purse. More…
If you want to know how we ended up getting seduced by a woman in a plastic Viking hat chatting away through an already-encrusted bloody nose while holding a piece of Styrofoam cheese in an emergency room parking lot, or if you’re wondering why we fell in love as she cheese-guitared Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” on a mountaintop perch—well, that part is pretty hard to explain. More…
We could look all day at the way form negotiates space in Marvin Gates’s Forwards and find in this a profound cerebral pleasure—but the moment we identify Death as such, our brains begin labeling the consequences of his arrival. The populace surrounding him takes on a meaning in this frozen moment, and we struggle to decipher it. More…
The New York City street scene seems too demanding a subject for a contemporary painting. One hardly sees it anymore. There is something about its profusion of characteristic details—the taxis, hydrants, and kiosks, the carts and vendors, the small bits of trash—that embarrasses the painter seeking a sense of new ideas and visions. More…
If the Grim Reaper were alive today, it seems he would be wearing sneakers. As the faceless city waits for cabs and hops in cars, he’s busy. He’s running around, jaw dropped—is he about to speak? Both his fists are clenched: one swings up in an even-paced trot, while the other grips a baby-blue case with fingerless gloves. What does he keep in there? More…
Giants are big and ugly, and ugly because they are big. Marvel at their presence, but know that you would also marvel at a hair follicle, if only it were enormous. The art world’s current giant is at PS1, clamping its teeth on all five boroughs and New Jersey and calling itself Greater New York. More…
All but a handful of stray citizens have given up on the City in On Things to Come. No buses, no dogs, no jackhammers, no hustle, no cramps, no squeezes. It is silent, Gates cranked the volume down. More…
The avant-garde isn’t what it used to be. Our sprawling culture industry busies itself mainly in locating things in the network presented by the relatively recent past. Everybody is described as the love child of so-and-so and so-and-so, so everybody gets called neo this or neo that, unless the parents are divorced—then they get called post. More…
He really had been a biker, before giving up everything about that lifestyle but the wardrobe. The room where I worked housed the coffee machine, and William would take refuge there from the noise, dust, and tedious solitude of the garage. By the time I left the job I’d heard most of his favorite stories. More…
In 1976 Ed Ruscha made the pastel drawing “Three Seconals, Three Darvons.” It’s a phenomenological sci-fi drug drawing of a phase transition. Out of a warm dust advance six clinically cold meds. Or else they drift into the dull smog. They simultaneously are and are not the same thing. More…
Like any good hitter, Ruscha swings with precision. He has a smooth stroke, which often gets called “cool,” and is often misunderstood as dependable. But Ruscha swings at a lot—palindromes, gas stations, entire empires—and so he occasionally strikes out. The abstract nouns Truth and Hope, set on faded teal and ice blue, are too bland to trouble me visually, or philosophically. More…
The financial and bureaucratic issues that complicated the selection of an artist to represent the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale are well known within the art world. Their choice of Ed Ruscha, among the most established and respected artists working today, was widely applauded. More…
It’s always heartening to see an underappreciated artist get his due, but in Ruscha’s case, this development is particularly sweet. For many years, his decision to live and work in Los Angeles—until recently isolated from and neglected by the New York-centered art world—has worked against him. More…
Mumford’s choice of subjects reveals how deeply the specter of the heroic haunts the representation of the ordinary; in viewing his work, we have to ask ourselves how far the myth of the hero has penetrated our conceptions both of wartime and the identity of the artist. Baghdad Journal plays into another heroic stereotype, that of the lone war reporter. More…
No military units would consider taking me on as an embedded artist at that time, so I thought I’d better just buy a ticket to Kuwait City and see if I could find a way into Iraq. After a few frustrating days I finally hooked up with two French reporters who gave me ride to Baghdad; there I found a battalion from 3rd ID with an enthusiastic commanding officer who gave me free reign with his platoons. More…
The intimacy, both of the situations Mumford painted and of his brush on the paper, gave us something we hadn’t seen from this war. As the publication of his Baghdad Journal approaches, some have begun to question the attention he’s received. Such questions would be more interesting if he had any competition. More…
I had seen Rothkos before, and I had seen Texas before, but never in the same place at the same time. It wasn’t a pilgrimage, but I did expect the Chapel to be a quasi-religious experience, and it was—merely one in a weekend full of them, from the consumer mecca of Houston’s teeming Galleria Mall to the uncanny relics of the minor San Antonio Missions. More…
In 1968, the Democratic Convention broke heads, so Guston broke out. Nixon swelled with lying, Guston drew him that way. Guston said he didn’t just want his paintings to sit on the wall. The world was horrible, and the art world was being polite. So Guston invited hairy limbs to the party. What are those limbs doing? Can anyone explain their behavior? More…
Steve Mumford’s watercolors from Iraq are, paradoxically, the most topical and the most stylistically out of sync works in the show, which might explain their placement on the walls of the hallway near the staff offices. An impressive corridor of images that Winslow Homer or John Singer Sergeant could have painted shows us details from our occupation of Iraq. More…
It’s impossible not to walk into Greater New York determined to sense the zeitgeist. But with over 160 artists represented, hardly a sliver of the emerging artist population of the five boroughs but still plenty to confound any amateur trendspotting, the more one tries to understand the rules the more everyone looks like an exception. More…
A huge survey show like Greater New York reveals the twin perils of inclusion: gathered under the banner of art, a scene made up of distinct practices is unnecessarily harmonized; and by its very eclecticism, the institution asserts its neutrality by implying that nothing has been left out. More…
Greater New York 2005 greets you as a wall of names behind a tall gate. The 163 identities are arranged, not surprisingly, in what Borges called alphabetical disorder. Undaunted and even inspired by the sheer incomprehensibility of something so very comprehensive, n+1 brings you “Art Week: Five days, five critics, numberless implications.” More…
To help pay for the operating costs of so large a building—the new MoMA is double the size of its predecessor—the museum’s administrators have boosted the price of admission by two thirds, from twelve dollars to twenty. More…
