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...
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