A towering video wall, striding sculpted figures, a refreshing fountain: Public art is sometimes contentious, but not at the new Comcast Center. The projects commissioned by developer Liberty Property Trust for the city’s newest office tower are immensely appealing, both as art and as entertainment. In particular, a massive high-definition video wall, which commands the entrance lobby, has already captured the public’s fancy. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
Three Artists Do It Themselves: DIY artists emphasize the personal and the handmade; draw inspiration from the world of craftsmanship, and tend to rely on “weak” materials such as fabric and paper. “Personal Protocols and Other Preferences,” a challenging and innovative exhibition curated by Maria Lind at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, demonstrates the variety of approaches that have come to be called DIY. [NY Sun]
Over exposed: Is Annie Leibovitz worthy of a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery?: Words such as trust, respect, service are bandied about. These are words that are at odds with what many of us think photographers are up to quite a lot of the time. But surely Leibovitz is not one of these? Surely Leibovitz, photographer of an entire, all-too-well-known world of stars and starlets, is not quite like this? [Independent]
June 26th, 2008 at 10:43 am
This article is filed under Art, Blog.
An inconvenient truth in Alexis Rockman’s work: Rockman has a reputation as an activist in the fight against environmental desecration: He made a huge splash in 2004 with a giant painting of New York as it might look (mostly submerged) a millennium from now. [Boston Globe]
Georgia O’Keeffe at the San Diego Museum of Art: Long before Hillary, there was Georgia — another woman of formidable talents whose charismatic, powerful husband afforded her substantial opportunities, even as he influenced the shaping of her public identity. [LA Times]
No way home: The work of Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese-born Palestinian, evokes exile and displacement. [New Statesman]
June 13th, 2008 at 9:54 am
This article is filed under Art, Blog.
Anne d’Harnoncourt: Discerning Enthusiasm for Art: Ms. d’Harnoncourt was a natural museum director in perhaps the best, most basic way. She had the kind of star quality that lights up rooms, but also the confidence to let her curators shine, knowing that their achievements reflected well on her and on the museum she loved so deeply. [NYT]
The Falls Guy: But Eliasson’s spectacle is much more complicated than The Gates, which consisted of thousands of saffron flags planted along 23 miles of paths. Robert Benazzi, the hydraulics designer working with Eliasson, created a system that will suck up the East River, lift it ten stories into the air, and drop it back down, thousands of gallons a minute. He says the only comparably complex job in his 40-year career was designing the sprinkler system for the Sears Tower. [NY Mag]
The Lure of the Curve: Rococo is the style that will not die. Born in France in the 18th century as a revolt against the ceremonial classicism of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, it spread throughout Europe, to Britain, and across the Atlantic to the American colonies, where its hedonistic exuberance was cooled temporarily by revolutionary tastes. [WSJ]
An Artist’s Vision: Building With Toys, but on a Grand Scale: But not far from him, partly shrouded on the trailer of a red Peterbilt truck, sat a sculpture made of hundreds of thousands of such pieces, painstakingly screwed together into a sturdy, almost crystalline creation. In essence, he had transformed a toy inspired by Manhattan buildings into a toy building approaching the size of some real buildings in Manhattan. [NYT]
June 9th, 2008 at 10:24 am
This article is filed under Art, Blog.
Classical Realism: Antidote to ‘Novelty Art’: “Classical Realism” is one name many of the more ambitious new figurative artists embrace. The movement has its home in institutions like The Florence Academy of Art, founded in 1991 by Daniel Graves, which seeks “to provide the highest level of instruction in classical drawing, painting and sculpture.” The Florence Academy has been a fertile source for many other initiatives, including The Harlem Studio of Art in New York, a small but vibrant atelier school presided over by the artist Judy Pond Kudlow. [Wall Street Journal]
Anish Kapoor challenges perceptions in a mind-bending show at the ICA: A gainst the rather dismissive definition of sculpture as something you bump into when you back away from a painting, Britain’s Anish Kapoor proposes a new definition: sculpture as a kind of optical whirlpool, something that sucks you in and makes all your certainties vanish. [Boston Globe]
A Colorless Look at Rockwell’s Romantic Realism: A tiny gem of an exhibit, “Norman Rockwell in Black and White,” offers just enough to make bien pensant bias against this American giant seem shallow and self-regarding. Eight rarely seen preparatory drawings offer valuable insight into the artist’s fastidious creative process and formal sophistication. [NY Sun]
May 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am
This article is filed under Art, Blog.
A sound artist hears symphonies in ambient noise: Bruce Odland is an artist whose medium is sound. Amid a culture dominated by the eyes, he’s pleading with us to open our ears. He’s not a musician in the traditional sense, though his tousled hair and dramatic gestures suggest a certain stage presence. He’s a master of the sea of natural and man-made sound – the aural flotsam and jetsam that most of us scarcely pay attention to. [CSM]
Thieves pilfering copper to peddle: Heavy metal is driving the latest trend in art theft. With the cost of copper and other metals skyrocketing, thieves around the world are targeting outdoor sculpture to sell as scrap. [Philadelpjia Inquirer]
A Businessman’s View of Mid-American Life: That is the unintentionally disquieting effect produced by many of the 210 black-and-white photographs that make up “Bill Wood’s Business,” a fascinating, compact exhibition at the International Center of Photography. [NYT]
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:13 am
This article is filed under Art, Blog.
When Artworks Collide: “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?,” a group show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Chelsea, is the latest proof that you don’t have to be a museum to shake things up. [NYT]
Goya at the Top of His Game: In late 1807 and early 1808, French troops began to occupy areas of northern Spain, beginning an international six-year war, in which Spanish guerrillas, as well as civilians, including women and children, defended their homeland, village by village, house by house, and even floor by floor. [NY Sun]
Better late than never: The art world has suddenly “discovered” Maria Lassnig at the venerable age of almost 90. [New Statesman]
May 16th, 2008 at 9:03 am
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Memories of Rauschenberg: ‘A giant among artists’: Artist Robert Rauschenberg used to say he intended for his work to fill the gap between art and life — and the morning after his death, friends and colleagues were left struggling for words to describe the gap he left in their lives and in the art world. [LA Times]
A Baghdad Rescue Operation: These painters were so poor, and art supplies were so expensive in Baghdad, that their canvases often contained only the thinnest veneer of color. Indeed, on one of the few occasions that Brownfield encountered Iraqi painters in the shop, they told him that Vincent van Gogh, great as he was, used too much good paint. [NY Mag]
Architect Rem Koolhaas saw what Vegas didn’t have, not what it needed: Like a lot of Las Vegas marriages, the one between the Venetian Hotel and the Guggenheim Museum was born of some seriously misplaced optimism. Presided over by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, with St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum standing by as a comically out-of-place bridesmaid, the union was planned in the late 1990s, when the Guggenheim brand and the transformative power of high-design architecture both seemed unassailable. [LA Times]
Museum showcases female punk scene: ‘Vexing: Female Voices From East L.A. Punk’ traces the history and the legacy of a key era. [LA Times]
May 14th, 2008 at 10:53 am
This article is filed under Art, Blog.
Faux feminisim: Is comtemporary art paying too much attention to work that should be ignored?: But what it demonstrates really is that the art world is in a terrific fizz about painting at the moment. It has suddenly decided that painting is not dead any more but very much alive. And like somebody startled from sleep, it can’t quite tell the difference between anything. [Independent]
Serra’s gargantuan art in Paris: France is making a fuss this week over Richard Serra, the 68-year-old American bantamweight who fashions elegant, gargantuan art out of steel. [IHT]
Power Dressing: The ideas that dominate fashion — identity, performance, gender, body shapes, sexuality, logos and the quest for state-of-the-art materials — pretty well describe the world of the superhero. These two forces are brought together in “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s playful look at comic book costumes and their influence on radical haute couture as well as high-tech sportswear. [NYT]
May 9th, 2008 at 9:45 am
This article is filed under Art, Blog.
Trunk calls: I am looking at a tree that is bearing some very strange fruit. Pairs of headphones have sprouted from its branches and are dangling invitingly at head height. Put on a pair and you’ll hear something surprising - the secret soundtrack of trees. The inner life of trees has been a lifelong obsession for the artist Alex Metcalf. [Guardian]
Many-colored Glass: Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke do windows: By the lights of many in the international art world, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke are the leading painters of our day, though it’s hard to find anyone who will declare them equally great. (I’m an exception.) Their careers are intertwined by biography and circumstance. [New Yorker]
Dubai Auction Sets Records: Parviz Tanavoli’s sculpture “The Wall (Oh Persepolis)” set a new world record for modern Iranian art when it sold for $2.84 million at Christie’s International Modern and Contemporary Art auction in Dubai on Wednesday night. The sale also marked the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction in the Middle East. Mr. Tanavoli’s piece, a nearly 6-foot-tall bronze sculpture covered in hieroglyphics, was one of many works by Middle Eastern artists that dominated the auction. [NY Sun]
May 6th, 2008 at 9:34 am
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New African Art, Resisting Assimilation: Into this confusion intelligently steps “Flow,” assembled by the Studio Museum in Harlem’s associate curator, Christine Y. Kim. The exhibition presents the work of 20 artists under the age of 40 who were either born in Africa or whose parents emigrated. Only a few of the artists in the show currently live in Africa full-time. Yet whatever their present location (most reside in the United States or Europe), each is immersed in a diasporic African artistic tradition whose contribution to world culture has been immeasurable. [Village Voice]
The Moving Image and Its Impact on Contemporary Art: Luckily, most of the artists in this ambitious and enjoyable survey of contemporary video and film don’t appear to be guided by the bromides of postmodern art theory. Indeed, this international sample of works from the last 50-odd years has defied efforts to separate artistic practice into two distinct installations. The first half, “Dreams,” up now through May 11, includes 21 pieces grouped around the exploration of the moving image as a trance state; the second half, “Realisms,” from June 19-Sept. 7, will present 20 works keyed more around social issues, including the nature of representation. [WSJ]
May 1st, 2008 at 9:59 am
This article is filed under Art, Blog.
