Zitat des Tages von Jerry Saltz:
Many things happened in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more 'political' than today. It's time to turn the page.
I wish I could write about shows outside New York. I often feel like the last person to know anything, because I almost never get to leave town, and when I do, I tend to go for three days max. Seeing between 30 and 40 shows a week in 100 or so galleries and museums takes up nearly all my time.
Turns out Picasso's passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.
In 1998, Artnet was the site that convinced me that if my writing didn't exist online, it didn't exist at all. It showed me criticism's future.
Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art.
'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.
I see artists bored by light-without-heat, irked at gigantic galleries' pushing out art-as-product, leaving behind the over determined for the undetermined, guided by interior voices and bringing us out of a long tunnel to new blueness.
Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money.
I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.
Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before.
I'm not for or against video - or any medium or style, for that matter.
It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.
In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.
As I went through 'This Progress,' one of two performance pieces by Tino Sehgal that transform Frank Lloyd Wright's emptied-out spiral into a dreamy Socratic-purgatorial journey, the museum literally fell away. I was suspended in some weird nonspace.
Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. 'The Water Lilies' give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light.
Lucian Freud's career affirms that the only thing an artist can do is remain true to whatever vision, (lack of) talent, or ideas that happened to pick them in order to be made known to the world.
The New York gallery scene being as incredibly overpopulated and overmoneyed as it is, deep conflicts and contradictions aren't hard to find.
Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties.
I like that the art world isn't regulated.
Galleries began growing in both number and size in the late seventies, when artists who worked in lofts wanted to exhibit their work in spaces similar to the ones the art was made in.
All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy.
In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.
The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer's journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It's not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive.
Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.
A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.
We're all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave, and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We're also allowed to change or modify our opinions.
The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.
Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease.
Only an artist as preternaturally acute and copacetic, as oddly visionary and just odd as Richard Artschwager, would be able to lay out the whole course of human evolution and have it make some kind of sense while also seeming like a dazzling insight.
Once artists are expected to shock, it's that much harder for them to do so.
When people in stadiums do the Wave, it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.
Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.
Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
When art wins, everyone wins.
