In 2003, artist David Hammons presented “Which Mike Would You Like to Be Like,” three vintage microphones standing alone in a room, representing three Michaels: Jackson, Tyson and Jordan. It was an ironic commentary on role models for African-Americans, a funny play on words, a great pun, all of the above; that’s the magic we’ve Read More
Patrick Jacobs set seven round lenses into the white walls of Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg. Behind them you’ll think you see close-up, ground-level photographs of pretty, green meadows. (The largest view is monochrome, but the rest are in color.) Far off beyond the fields are winding roads, rivers, bridges, power lines, hills and, in two Read More
On the fourth floor of “The Last Newspaper,” the New Museum’s tribute and elegy to the news business, old papers are stacked into a corner and bound with string. The piles, by artist Robert Gober, are made to resemble bundles headed to recycling. The New York Times is represented, as, I thought, was The Observer. Read More
There’s a sexual undertow in the work of Zurich artist Pipilotti Rist that’s been there since the very beginning of her now-superstar career. In her breakout video, I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986), she danced bare-breasted as the camera’s focus grows increasingly blurry; in another, Pickelporno (1992), now in the collection of the Read More
The pioneers of photography discovered one thing almost immediately: Statues make ideal models. Because they never twitched, much less moved, during long shutter exposures, a bust of Patroclus or a Roman portrait hung in the British Museum allowed early masters of the medium, like William Henry Fox Talbot in 1846 and Roger Fenton Read More
It’s time we had a talk about Damien Hirst. I know, I know. Mr. Hirst, who was born in 1965 and came to prominence in the London art scene of the late 1980s as the first among equal of the Young British Artists, has for so long been ascending to the kind of fame perversely Read More
