On Sunday night, at the dead center of the Guggenheim Museum’s spiral cavity, the performance artist Marina Abramovi c re-enacted a Joseph Beuys performance from 1965 called How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Honey was used to adhere gold leaf to her face; it fluttered like flame at the back of her head. Read More
On Sunday night, at the dead center of the Guggenheim Museum’s spiral cavity, the performance artist Marina Abramović re-enacted a Joseph Beuys performance from 1965 called How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Honey was used to adhere gold leaf to her face; it fluttered like flame at the back of her head. She Read More
The American painter Megan Olson (born 1971) calls the current exhibition of her paintings Still Movement, which I take to be an allusion to still life-an impression that’s amply confirmed in pictures that depict the dynamic processes of nature with a precision, stability and concreteness that are traditionally reserved for the painting of inert, three-dimensional Read More
There are currents of influence on the contemporary art scene so pervasive that, in retrospect, they seem to define an entire era. For a good many artists and critics who came of age in the heyday of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940′s and 1950′s, the principal influences were those of Jackson Pollock, Willem Read More
Here’s a recipe for disaster: Mix the efficiency of James Rosenquist’s neo-Dadaist commentaries on commodity culture with the drab cut-and-paste aesthetic of David Salle; add a dollop of Gerhard Richter’s slick and soulless professionalism; blend, and pepper lightly with Eric Fischl’s ready-made indictments of middle-class America. Place in oven until lukewarm. After 15 minutes (of Read More
Second Career for Martin Mull:
Maker of Hefty Pomo Art
Here’s a recipe for disaster: Mix the efficiency of James Rosenquist’s neo-Dadaist commentaries on commodity culture with the drab cut-and-paste aesthetic of David Salle; add a dollop of Gerhard Richter’s slick and soulless professionalism; blend, and pepper lightly with Eric Fischl’s ready-made indictments of Read More
What a thrill it is to visit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum right now. You heard me: thrill . From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art , an exhibition culled from the museum’s permanent collection, is a sterling example of truth in advertising: They’ve got classics, and plenty of them. The show is so Read More
Raiding the Storage Racks:
The Guggenheim’s Good Stuff
What a thrill it is to visit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum right now. You heard me: thrill . From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art , an exhibition culled from the museum’s permanent collection, is a sterling example of truth in advertising: They’ve got Read More
Charlie Finch, art critic for ArtNet.Com , recently described me as someone who “sees every work of art as an extension of a Color Field stretching back into the Nixon era, shunning the radical, the kinky and the original.” Just to set the record straight, it’s not the Nixon era I’m pining for, it’s the Read More
Seek My Face , by John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages, $23.
The premise of Seek My Face is clean and powerful, like a canvas by Barnett Newman: An old woman, a painter who has lived a full life (three husbands, among them two “men of genius”), is being interviewed by a young Read More
