8 July 2010 | Architecture, Contemporary, Museums
The Winter 2010 issue of Critical Inquiry is gripping, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention. Editor W.J.T. Mitchell gives the background in his introduction: In the spring of 2009, Critical Inquiry received an article from [UCLA English and comparative literature professor] Saree Makdisi critiquing the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation’s proposed Museum of Tolerance in [...]
22 June 2010 | Contemporary, Theory
In an article in the Dec. ’09 journal of visual culture (8:3), “Apart from Sex,” Adrian Rifkin writes: “[Andres] Serrano’s dildo picture reminds of Butler’s Derridian theses of the origin-like quality of the copy, insofar as it is quite impossible to figure the boy’s penis without his a priori penetration by the rubber or silicone [...]
17 June 2010 | Contemporary
In a recent issue of October (n. 130), thirty-two contributors responded to a questionnaire on “The Contemporary” written by Hal Foster: [M]uch present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment … At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, ‘contemporary art’ has become an institutional object in its own right: in [...]
15 June 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Nka (n. 25), editor Salah M. Hassan writes: In gesturing toward a theoretical framework with which to comprehend the breadth and depth of the work of this generation of African diaspora artists, several art critics have referred to them as “Afropolitans,” which could serve to embody a sense of cosmpolitanism [...]
4 June 2010 | Contemporary
Last night the Dallas Museum of Art presented a talk with Luc Tuymans. The DMA recently opened the first US retrospective of the artist (organized by the Wexner and SFMOMA). I enjoy how the subdued palette of his work combined with the paintings’ subject matter produces a feeling that lingers, or haunts the viewer (like [...]
6 May 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
A few people have already commented on Cy Twombly’s recently unveiled ceiling for the Louvre (here and here) – including one technically detailed letter that reveals a significant part of it was painted by a professor of art history! Last night art historians Alex Potts (who has a forthcoming book on post-war art) and Richard [...]
4 May 2010 | Contemporary, Journals
In a recent issue of Grey Room (n. 37), T.J. Demos writes …. In the journal October, art historian and critic David Joselit raises the seeming contradiction of discovering art that is critical toward consumerism in the very site of the commercial art gallery … [However] the potential of the gallery as a site of [...]
24 April 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
Neo Rauch, central figure in the so-called Leipzig School of German painting, observes his fiftieth birthday with a double retrospective in Leipzig and Munich. The catalog is from Hatje Cantz.
21 April 2010 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Prompted by the opening of Les Promesses du Passé at the Centre Pompidou, some recent work on post-Wall “Eastern European” art (one of the tenets of the exhibition is to demonstrate the irrelevance of this term in light of the polyphony of voices; the exhibition layout is designed to be discontinuous, accordingly): Transitland is a [...]
19 April 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
With the integration of technology and electronic media in art, new issues in contemporary art continue to arise. A recent encounter with such type art has raised a particular question for me. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth currently has on view a FOCUS show of American-born artist Ben Jones: Jones’ work investigates new methods [...]
16 April 2010 | Contemporary
In the spring 2010 issue of X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly, Damon Willick writes a memorial to the art historian Henry T. Hopkins (1928-2009): In 1960, Hopkins directed the Huysman Gallery, which was across the street from the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega. Though Huysman’s history was brief, the gallery offered an alternative to the dominant Ferus Gallery [...]
14 April 2010 | Career, Contemporary
In a recent issue of American Art (23:3), Joshua Shannon writes that the field of contemporary art history is now producing more job openings than “Nineteenth-Century Art and the Art of the United States combined – the two boom fields of a generation ago,” but that it is also changing rapidly. For starters, its center [...]
19 March 2010 | Asia, Contemporary
The Japan Times interviews “Shihoko Iida, who late last year resigned from one of Tokyo’s most progressive contemporary art venues, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and is now six months into a two-year sojourn at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia”: Working in Australia has also opened Iida’s eyes to how her nation’s art [...]
23 February 2010 | Books, Contemporary
Oxford University Press recently mailed us a new essay collection by critic David Levi Strauss, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual. Strauss has remained relatively little known despite plaudits from Arthur Danto, John Berger, Dave Hickey, and others. Perhaps Oxford will change things (his previous collections were published by Autonomedia and Aperture). This [...]
11 February 2010 | Conferences, Contemporary
College Art Association conference attendees, you could return home with some actual art — free! That is, if you’re willing to leave the hotel to look for it. From yesterday’s Chicago Tribune: [Patrick Skoff] tools around Chicago for a few hours and leaves hundreds of dollars worth of his art in random spots. He drops [...]
7 December 2009 | Contemporary
Carol Yinghua Lu writes in e-flux journal: I was recently invited by the editors of Afterall to contribute to a book they are preparing on the monumental 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” with a text reflecting on the impact of this exhibition on the practice of Chinese artists … As one of the earliest [...]
23 November 2009 | Contemporary
From the Guardian: … the art historian John Richardson, whose multi-volume life of Picasso has been called the best artist’s biography ever written, and who knew Bacon from the 1940s, has argued that the best of Bacon’s art stemmed precisely from his sadomasochistic sexual relationships at their most intense, which also led directly to the [...]
20 November 2009 | Contemporary
Artist Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, known as Jeanne-Claude, has died. She was, of course, the longtime collaborator with Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, known as Christo. Of the numerous obituaries that are now appearing, few seem to want to deal with the questions of authorship, individuality, and gender relations that were raised by their collaboration, which have [...]
16 November 2009 | Contemporary
ARTINFO interviews Gerhard Richter: In his essay, [Benjamin] Buchloh discusses the various associations white paintings can have — with the idea of reductiveness, the end of painting. And of course there are Rauschenberg’s white paintings, and Ryman’s. Were any of these things on your mind while you worked on yours? I don’t know the Rauschenberg [...]
29 October 2009 | Contemporary, Photography
From The New York Times: Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas and became one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling its people and its jazz giants, has died. He was 89. His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his [...]
