Posted in Art, Art History, Painting on Sep 30th, 2010
ShareTHIS JUST CAME IN OVER THE E-TRANSOM: An announcement of an upcoming special showing of The Desert of Forbidden Art at Rutger’s Zimmerli Art Museum. Below is the press release. Mark your calendars. It looks terrific. Not your garden variety art film. [Be sure to click on the links to Savitsky's bio and to the [...]
Posted in Art, Environmental Piety, Painting on Sep 29th, 2010
ShareENVIRONMENTAL PIETY IS A LARGE COMPONENT of contemporary artists’ interest in landscape. Artists announce their state of grace by genuflecting to the forms and ecosystems of the natural world. This displacement of religious impulses onto nature—Mother Mary, dressed in green—is seconded even by the churches. Think of the altar to Gaia in New York’s Cathedral [...]
ShareNEW YORK REMAINS A MARKET TOWN but it is increasingly hard to call it a creative center. Even what comes to market tends to cluster around the contemporary commonplaces that clog Chelsea and its satellite on the Lower East Side. Much good work is exhibited outside the official precincts. If you can make it to [...]
ShareTHE LOVELINESS OF JOHNNIE WINONA ROSS’ paintings elude translation into either reproduction or verbal description. Their latticed structure reproduces but not the subtleties of the guiding hand behind it. Compositional clarity and order can be conveyed only at the cost of intimacy with the small, exquisite freedoms that loosen the architecture to let in air [...]
SharePRICK HUNDREDS OF CONTEMPORARY PAINTINGS and the air goes out of them. Prick a fine botanical and it bleeds. With Derrick Guild’s florilegium of oversized, counterfeit botanical paintings, a prick gets you a some of both: a little blood and a bit more air than is needed. Blood is the best part.
The lifeblood of historical [...]
ShareI FIRST SAW JOSEPH HASKE’S PAINTING nine years ago at Sears Payton in New York. I have been following his exhibitions ever since. The simplicity of his imagery, conveyed through richly developed surfaces, apppealed to me. Surface quality is, quite possibly, the most difficult aspect of painting. Here was a painter who had husbanded his [...]
Posted in Art Writing, Things to Read on Sep 15th, 2010
ShareTonight, Wednesday the 15th, Anthony Haden-Guest is giving a reading at HP Garcia, a newish gallery in New York’s garment district. Haden-Guest is variously described as a reporter, cartoonist, art critic, poet and socialite. Something tells me that socialite might be the most significant, given the gossipy, insider stuff he has written about the art [...]
Posted in Art, Culture Cues on Sep 11th, 2010
ShareIT IS HARD, SOMETIMES, to know whether to cry or curse. Cursing satisfies the soul but a heart-felt expletive is better when it is blurted out loud. It just does not look right in print. A good curse deserves to be said in full, not weakened with bowdlerizing fig leaves: @#$!%!! Besides, there really are [...]
Posted in Art Education, Artistic Identity, Culture Cues, Things to Read on Sep 10th, 2010
ShareA reader sent me this listing posted yesterday on Craigslist. It came with the simple word “Yikes!” That is about as eloquent as you can get over a post that is almost too forlorn for words. The listing appeared, appropriately enough, all in lower case. Diminished punctuation suits the pathos of the quest:
performance artist looking [...]
Posted in Art, Art Education, Artistic Identity, Culture Cues, Things to Read on Sep 6th, 2010
ShareTHIS IS A SOBERING LABOR DAY. We have seen the employment statistics. Somewhere under the rubble of numbers are artists—semi-employed, underemployed—supporting themselves with every imaginable odd job: a part-time adjunctcy here, another there; waiting tables; house painting; dog walking; carpentry—you name it. Yet institutions of so-called higher learning, keep turning out M.F.A. candidates on the [...]