After I finished my latest review at the Examiner, a piece on his drawing show at Peter Blum, I did a Google News search to see if it popped up. It did, but I also found this other article about the practice of artists trading work to each other. As a poor artist and father, this quote from artist Alessandro Raho made me laugh: I suppose now that we've got our son, Roman, we're aware that pieces have a certain value, though that isn't why we acquired them. It's an area we know about, so why not take advantage of that? The Alex Katz I got was definitely a good opportunity. I suppose it shouldn't be in the dining room -- it's only a matter of time before Roman throws food at it....
Over at the LA Times, art critic Christopher Knight has fired a salvo in favor of academic sanity in the war over an archive that may have been Frida Kahlo's. A collection of some 1,200 items, which contains everything from small paintings to recipes, is hotly contested. Knight sums up the controversy in a blog post: More than a dozen prominent people have claimed the archive is a fake, even though none of them has seen it. Frida Kahlo 007a Like I said, bizarre. The archive's owners, Leticia Fernandez and Carlos Noyola, haven't even made a definitive claim that the 1,200-piece archive did in fact belong to Kahlo -- although their initial research certainly leads them in that direction. That's why they acquired it in 2004. Several notable artists who lived and worked with Kahlo and her husband, famed muralist Diego Rivera, have examined it. Arturo Bustos, Arturo Estrada and Rina Lazo are convinced of its authenticity, and they have attested as much. The question for Knight, and the art world generally, is why a knee-jerk barricading of authenticity happens whenever new material comes to light. The choice isn't between immediately accepting or not accepting. The imperative is to investigate...
I was not expecting to find what I did when I went to see Roxy Paine's "Maelstrom" installation at the Met. You can read my piece on it over at the Examiner....
I've been working on a series of drawings about the idea of special places -- spiritual, interior places that seem protected. Trying formally to investigate patterns versus exceptions, softness versus clarity, interior versus exterior, and light versus dark. All these drawings were done in August and are ink and gouache on 12 x 9 in. watercolor paper....
