The Muse at the Museum
Without ever having seen a photograph of her, I recognized Ada Katz immediately the first time I encountered her in person. She wasn't even standing near her somewhat less iconic husband, the artist...
View ArticleArt and the Myth of Fingerprints
"Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?" is a new documentary about art authentication with dubious claims on its own legitimacy. Ostensibly, it tells the story of Teri Horton, a 73-year-old former...
View ArticleComics With a Sense of Tragedy
"I decided to take pencils, crayons, paints, sketchpads as my weapons to challenge the so called 'future,'" the South African Themba Siwela once wrote of his decision to become a comic-strip artist....
View ArticleMany Books, Many Miles
"My generation has a very awkward relationship with words and books," one of the best-known contemporary Chinese artists, Xu Bing, said in a recent interview. His parents worked at Beijing University,...
View ArticleTurning Confinement Into Beauty
The work of "outsider" artist Martín Ramírez (18951963) throbs with the sense of being trapped inside trapped by circumstance, trapped in his head. Being an untrained artist who worked for his own...
View ArticlePortraits of the Artists, Young & Old
There is something prurient about wanting to see images of artists, especially artists in their studios. They tease us, offering a glimpse of someone's routine, a glimpse that is meant to stand in for...
View ArticleTime to Spare
The seminal artistic problem of the last half century has been how to represent time. Attempts to solve that problem have altered and expanded our aesthetic universe. Two new exhibits, each culled from...
View ArticleGoulash by Committee
The "Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts" at the American Academy of Arts and Letters is a goulash in which some ingredients seem fresher than others. Bringing together the work of 34 contemporary...
View ArticleA Sprawling, Riotous Argument
What electric, various, and searching art women have been making over the past 17 years. I don't know what "Global Feminisms" will tell you about feminist thought around the world, but this sprawling...
View ArticleBlossoms, Bubbles & Beauty
Neither abstraction nor the influence of comic strips and cartoons on fine art has lacked commentary. But even now, when humor pervades contemporary visual arts, the two are rarely contained within the...
View ArticleWide Awake
Zen Buddhism is not merely emptiness, "no mind," and koans. Among other things, it maintains a robust tradition of figure painting, a tradition magnificently celebrated by "Awakenings: Zen Figure...
View ArticleWith Her Back to the Turmoil
"Classicists are people who look out with their backs to the world," the painter Agnes Martin once wrote in a prose poem. Later she added, "You stand with your back to the turmoil." These words come...
View ArticleThinking Inside the Frame
By merely framing a patch of the world, a photograph invites us to see what is easily passed over. Such is the modest notion proposed by "Hidden in Plain Sight," a tightly organized exhibition of about...
View ArticleA Wicked Ventriloquist
In America where, as Wallace Stevens once wrote, "money is a kind of poetry" it makes sense that advertising might be seen as a kind of art. From Gerald Murphy and Charles Sheeler to Andy Warhol...
View ArticleEnough at the Table for All
On Sunday, no fewer than 12 exhibitions opened at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. "We have a big building," one staffer chuckled when I noted the superabundance of shows. Indeed they have filled every...
View ArticleWhen Artists Turn To Film
Matthew Barney's grandiose, five-film extravaganza "The Cremaster Cycle" (19952003) established his role as myth-making wizard of the art-world Oz. Now three of his short films, on view for one week...
View ArticleStep 1: Buy Paint. Step 2: ?
Once upon a time, we knew what painting was. As recently as the 1960s, there was, if not a single consensus, then at least several broad and overlapping consensuses about what constituted a painting:...
View ArticlePutting a Name To a Face
"Intrigued But Resistant" those were the words that flashed above my face on the wallsize screen when I first entered the room housing "Taken," one of two video installations that comprise the show...
View ArticleWeaving Dreams of Mom and Dad
"Love and Loss," a trilogy of videos by Neil Goldberg, currently at the Jewish Museum, constitutes, in a sense, several chapters of autobiography, spoken in the third person. Or persons, as the...
View ArticleInteractive But Not Engaging
The common assumption is that people want to "interact" with their newspapers and televisions, with science or history museum displays, with politicians during a debate, and with art is all too...
View ArticleThe Shapes of Time
'Without TimeWithout BodyWithout Place," Wolfgang Laib's (b. 1950) first solo outing at Sean Kelly Gallery, achieves the spareness implied by its title while still flounting its content. Perhaps the...
View ArticlePrince: 'Spiritual America'
When the expertly organized and relentlessly needling Richard Prince retrospective opens tomorrow at the Guggenheim Museum, one hopes it won't so completely delight the art world that it fails to...
View ArticleCompassion or Condemnation?
On one wall of Raymond Pettibon's new show at David Zwirner Gallery are the words "Israel Is Moral," painted in light blue, with a caret inserting the letter "t" between the "r" and "a" of the final...
View ArticleA Collector's Fantasy on Display
"The Incomplete," a huge exhibition filling all three floors of the Chelsea Art Museum, consists of work entirely from a private collection, that of Hubert Neumann an awkward, though not...
View ArticlePartners in Time
"Black, White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe," a new documentary about the late curator Sam Wagstaff, calls him "totally forgotten." This epithet is not entirely accurate,...
View ArticleNot Quite Watching Paint Dry
At one point in the new biopic "Klimt," a pompous critic explains his aesthetic theory to a group of friends at a Vienna coffeehouse by pointing to a gilt-framed mirror: because it is functional, the...
View ArticleCapturing the Discordant
Among the first works one encounters in "Atair," the new show at Andrea Rosen Gallery by the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968), is a large C-print depicting a newspaper's front page,...
View ArticleA Group of One-Liners
Francesco Vezzoli's "Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!" (2006) spoofs the sort of celebrity biography the kind that typically appears on "E! True Hollywood Story" many people try to avoid when...
View ArticleAutomatic for the People
"You are the product of television. You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer." So says "Television Delivers People," a video made in 1975 by Richard Serra, which also gives its name to a...
View ArticleStraight off the Streets
Stenciled on a swathe of fake white bricks, which is hung in a tidy frame, are the words "Lying to the police is never wrong." This cheesy effect of cheaply packaged protest happens to be a product of...
View ArticleBefore the Buildings
Architectural drawings and models do not easily inhabit gallery spaces. The reach of three dimensions and the impact of size seem so crucial to creating the drama of architecture that buildings in...
View ArticleDislocating Dreams
Luis Gispert (b. 1972) is a Miami-based artist whose considerable talents have earned him a show, called "El Mundo Es Tuyo (The World Is Yours)," that occupies two prestigious galleries. "Smother," a...
View ArticleJohn Chamberlain's Heavy Metal
The five large pieces in his new show at PaceWildenstein Gallery suggest that the sculptor John Chamberlain (b. 1927), now in his 81st year, has lost none of the playfulness and verve that have long...
View ArticleWhat Makes a Museum?
The final phase of the New Museum's inaugural exhibition, "Unmonumental," is largely devoted to work that challenges the traditional definition of what constitutes a museum. "The Sound of Things:...
View ArticleRainbow Coalition
"Color Chart," a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is an exhibition so simple and right in its conception that one marvels at the fact that it hasn't been done before. The show gathers work...
View ArticleIn Keeping With Warhol
When it opened in 1980 at the Jewish Museum after first showing at a Jewish community center in Rockville, Md., and at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami Andy Warhol's exhibition "Ten...
View ArticleFigure and Ground
The British artist Katy Moran (b. 1975) employs a palette out of Turner, brushstrokes borrowed from de Kooning, and the press release of a lesser Gerhard Richter or some other conceptual painter. Yet...
View ArticleOnscreen Angst, Straight From the '60s
With "Because of Him," their new exhibition at Cheim & Read, the collaborative duo McDermott & McGough have finally arrived in the 1960s. About a quarter-century ago, David McDermott (b. 1952)...
View ArticleWords of Wisdom and Wit
The criteria shaping "Lots of Things Like This," a new exhibition at apexart curated by the author Dave Eggers, are as simple and deadpan as its title. Mr. Eggers sought work containing an image, some...
View ArticleIn Brilliant Color
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) tends to focus on the simplest things, the most elemental phenomena. Wander through his room-size installations and you'll find yourself largely alone...
View Article'Double Album' at the New Museum
Walter Pater asserted in the 19th century that all art constantly aspires to the condition of music. Today's contemporary artists, however, seem mainly to aspire to talk about music in the...
View ArticleAmy Bessone's Artificial Appeal
Amy Bessone paints figurines as if they were human beings. This might seem a simple and potentially static approach, yet the 12 large oils in the Los Angeles-based artist's first New York solo show,...
View ArticleRobert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008
I remember well the first time I saw Robert Rauschenberg, who died yesterday at age 82. It was at a Whitney Museum opening in the early 1990s, and the artist, whom I did not meet, stood in the...
View ArticleA Commitment to Color
The foundation myth of Color Field painting goes something like this: In 1953, two Washington, D.C.-based artists, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, paid a visit to the New York studio of Helen...
View ArticleThe National Academy Museum's Grab-Bag Anthology
With the work of 130 artists on display, "The 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art" at the National Academy Museum is a bit of a grab bag. As compared with previous...
View ArticleThree Artists Do It Themselves
One corporate-style production-line aesthetics inaugurated by Andy Warhol (and celebrated by artists from Damien Hirst to Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons) has been the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) reaction to...
View Article'Retrospective': Been There, Sold That
'Retrospective," a group show at Gagosian's 21st Street gallery, is like a summer concert festival with some very promising, big-name acts. Its organizing principle, the ways a major artist looks back...
View ArticleThe Twins of the Rec Room: Os Gemeos
Os Gemeos "the twins," in Portuguese is the nom de plume of the twin Brazilian artists Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo (b. 1974) of São Paulo, Brazil. Their work borrows the idioms of outsider and folk...
View ArticleWiley Conquers the 'World Stage'
When Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) began exhibiting his portraits of young African-American males some five years ago, they hit a cultural sweet spot, bringing a hip-hop swagger into the gallery, and...
View ArticlePainting Pushes Its Limits
"Painting: Now and Forever, Part II," a group show occupying both the Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali galleries, refers back to a survey of contemporary painting (Part I) held a decade ago at Marks...
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