If bloggers have a roundtable and no one blogs about it, is it still a media event? I'm not sure, but I'll do my duty and blog about it any way. Hung over and in not a great mood to look at art, I was pleased to listen to the Red Dot Art Fair's blogger's roundtable at the Park Hotel. It featured Carol Diehl (ArtVent, Edward Winkleman, C-Monster, Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City), Sharon Butler (Two Coats of Paint) and Joanne Mattera was moderator. My favorite part was bloggers recounting their favorite big-traffic headlines. Who can top "How to preserve a chocolate Santa butt plug"? I didn't get a chance to ask a question, but I would've asked: is there something innate in the medium that makes a successful blog unable to have thought-out critical writing? After all, it takes time to look and to think and to write this kind of material. Can meaningful ciriticsm be Twittered?...
I took some time today to stop by the Christie's in Rockefeller Plaza for the First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art preview. The auction happens April 1. There were a lot of shocking sticker prices that made me wonder how long the art market can maintain this. The place was packed, however, and there was a lot of good work there. This is one of those cases where I didn't photograph all my favorite work -- just what struck my fancy for one reason or another. See photos below, with Christie's estimated prices attached -- and my totally unqualified commentary on those prices. Ida Applebroog, Untitled (Knife), 1995. Estimate: $5,000-7,000. DG estimate: Completely worth it. Applebroog seems underappreciated. Andy Warhol, Untitled (Furniture), circa 1960. Estimate: $20,000-30,000. DG estimate: Worth it... if you must buy a Warhol. Seeing this charming tempera work reminds me of how much I like Warhol's illustrations. They're much better than the horrific star-fucking icon paintings. As a painter friend of mine is fond of saying, Warhol was a genius because he painted icons. Who doesn't want Marilyn in their living room? If I were a museum (and I understand that I'm a relic, at least) I...
Reading John Ruskin is like sitting in a living room with that good old grandmother of yours who lived through the Great Depression and World War II and everything after. Not the annoying one who talks about being part of "the Greatest Generation" (though that seems to be more of an anxiety-born boomer label for them). I'm talking about the one known for her patience, thoughtfulness, inner strength and forgiveness. Perhaps she's named Mildred or Barbara and she's tougher than you and twice as kind. Reading John Ruskin's thoughts on art reminded me of her. "Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life," says John Ruskin, in his long essay "The Nature of Gothic," originally published in 1853. He continues: It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, --a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, -- is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and...
There is an orgy of art happening at the Met these days and I encourage everyone to check out the Poussin show (which converted me to playing in the fields with nymphs), the Courbet show (wowsers) and last but not least, Jasper Johns. There were several surprises for me in the Johns "Gray" show: first, the show is big. I was thinking a small gallery of a handful of paintings. No. It's pretty much a Johns retrospective in black and white, as if you've bought a cheap used copy of a '60s book on Johns -- only they're the real fucking paintings. The second surprise for me was that I like Johns again. I used to count him as a living giant, but after the exhaustion of his MoMA retrospective in 1997 and a few sightings of his current work, I'd forgotten how great his early work is. During this "Gray" show, I even came to like pieces that I never cared for, and it may be because I'm reading a book on David Hockney right now and I realize the two share a lot. Hockney came to art school in the '50s at the height of abstraction's dominance...
After hearing so many negative things about the inaugural show at the new New Museum, I really draged my feet before heading down to check it out. Since the waves of negativity primed me for a bad show, I was in the best possible place to go see it: Things could only look up from what I was expecting. Right? Right. It's not as bad as you've heard, but let's face it: it's still not good. The show features lots of work using disposable materials, magazines and cardboard boxes and couches found on the curb. This doesn't make it a bad show. What makes it a bad show is the lack of originality or ambition. Since it was my first trip to the new space, I kept thinking about the shows I saw at the old New Museum. One of my favorites was Tom Friedman, whose work was done with fingernail clippings, bubble gum, and construction paper. I loved his show because he seemed to think long and hard about his mediums and what strctural power they had embedded inside their physicality. When he made a bird skeleton out of fingernail clippings, it made sense. The shapes and endurance of...
I finally made it out to the new New Museum on Bowery. I have fond memories of the old building in Soho, although I would always leave that space remembering the awkwardness and particularities of a museum shoe-horning itself into a very old building not designed for museum display. The first thing I noticed approaching the new building on Bowery is that it looks like a prison, except designed for Dr. Caligari. I understand the steel fence is supposed to operate like a scrim, filtering out light to a shimmering effect. Instead, it just looks like constrictive chain link. WIthout many windows, the steel looks like it's designed to keep people in. The charming, weird character of the old space -- the space I was sometimes frustrated with, but always remembered -- is gone. No more mini-mezzanine or exposed brick or little spaces for curators to figure out. That's been replaced with a lot of new space for exhibits. There are three floors for New Museum shows. The space is generic. Large white box warehouse space that could be in Chelsea or Cleveland or anywhere. It's monumental space with high ceilings that can actually house monumental sculpture and painting...
I went to the Whitney Biennial today. I plan on writing a longer review, but I thought I would draw up a list of words and phrases out of my notebook to maybe give the tenor of what's up. Like most Biennials, it was a mixed bag of work. Very few stand-outs for me, but the mood was very strong -- like a lo-fi Indie rock album. If it's supposed to be a portrait of the artworld moment, then the curators did a good job. Here's my list : found objects involuntary medium slap-dash rickety DIY boring games shifting perspective transferrence one thing becomes another antiquated realism nostalgia consumer expression mixed media, mixed message optimism rebuilding creating a 3-D experience unfinished space seduce, reuse, recycle disappeared past fragility juxtaposition permeable escaping the museum jerry saltz is excited publicly private multiplying perspectives personal response to mass media at an intersection life-sized collage faux decadence nature is gone if artists are questioning art, curators aren't...
