20 July 2006 | Contemporary
Nine years on from his untimely death, Martin Kippenberger had a retrospective recently at Tate Modern that’s now in Düsseldorf (“Happy End of Franz Kafka’s America” is the centerpiece) and he’s doing well at auction too. How would the artist, whose car of choice was the homely Ford Capri, react? “I can’t cut off an [...]
22 May 2006 | Books, Contemporary
Reviewing Pamela M. Lee’s Chronophobia: On Art and Time in the 1960s for CAA Reviews, Christopher Bedford writes: “the limitation of the project for me is that Lee does not reflect explicitly enough on the tightly interwoven fabric of art and criticism that emerges so vividly in her coverage of the ’60s … It might [...]
19 May 2006 | Books, Contemporary
From the MIT Press blog: “We’re very pleased to introduce a new collaboration with Afterall Publishing … Afterall came about in 1998, when the artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis and the curator and writer Charles Esche conceived a journal called Afterall, with the goal of foregrounding the work of contemporary artists … Afterall is now [...]
19 May 2006 | Contemporary
In the catalogue to the Lorna Simpson exhibition, Okwui Enwezor writes: “the black image is a troubled image; it perturbs the conscience, unsettles the tranquility of settled canons of beauty … it is foremost a political image before it could ever become a vessel for probing the epistemological fundaments of artistic tradition … Therein lies [...]
16 May 2006 | Contemporary
In the catalogue to the exhibition Ed Ruscha: Photographer, Margit Rowell writes “Ruscha has always claimed to be a painter who made photographs … ‘what I was after was no-style or a non-statement with a no-style.’ Observations like these imply that Ruscha’s primary aim was to make nonaesthetic documentary photographs. Yet the work and its [...]
11 May 2006 | Conservation, Contemporary
Insurer AXA Art “announced its third conservation research award to Tate in London.” The €225,000 award benefits “an international collaborative research in preventive and practical conservation of acrylic works … Acrylic paints and primers have been widely used by artists since the early 1960s. They account for approximately 50% of paint sales over the last [...]
10 May 2006 | Contemporary, Museums
From the Korea Times: “The government of [South Korea's] Kyonggi Province and Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation kicked off the construction of the Nam June Paik Museum in Yong-in, south of Seoul, on Tuesday, aimed at commemorating the Korean-born late video artist Paik Nam-june … officially announcing the start of the 28.9 billion won ($31 million) project [...]
8 May 2006 | Contemporary
Images of war: still an all too urgent topic. The edited volume War Visions incorporates analysis of comics and computer games into the study of the aesthetics of war (reviewed by Anne Ulrich). Agnes Matthias considers 30-odd artists who have used photography to address wars of the 1980s and 1990s, connecting them to the history [...]
4 May 2006 | Contemporary
“Schein ist mein Lebensthema,” declared Gerhard Richter in 1989 (“appearance is my life’s subject”). Correspondingly, critics have seen in his work a deep skepticism of reality — its declarations, moralities, movements, positions, and ideologies. Jürgen Schreiber’s provocative new biographical study of the artist’s family pictures reaches a radically different conclusion, writes Eduard Beaucamp. According to [...]
27 April 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
More art-historically informed comment on the Mohammed cartoons controversy: In the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Damian Dombrowski writes that the roots of modern caricature can be found in Bernini’s drawings, a cultural achievement that shouldn’t be confused with a blanket license to injure.
26 April 2006 | Books, Contemporary
Professor Vicky Clark and Warhol Museum director Tom Sokolowski led a discussion on artistic censorship last Friday at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “An instance Clark used was when she was working on a book, ‘Comic Release,’ in which artists were using well-known cartoon characters for their own interpretative art pieces. It soon became an [...]
19 April 2006 | Conferences, Contemporary
From the intriguingly themed group blog, “Medical Humanities: A conversation about the intersection between medicine and the arts,” comes this illustrated post on the AAH conference: “Last week I spent three happy days in Leeds at the Association of Art Historians annual conference. On the last day I co-convened the student session and was pleased [...]
10 April 2006 | Contemporary
“Allan Kaprow, the artist who combined painting, sculpture and theater in flamboyant events that he staged in unexpected locations and referred to as ‘happenings,’ has died. He was 79. A founding member of the visual arts department at UC San Diego, Kaprow died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in Encinitas, his studio manager, [...]
5 April 2006 | Contemporary
Recently deceased Australian artist Pro Hart — like Thomas Kinkade, Jack Vettriano, Norman Rockwell, Andrew Wyeth, and countless others before him — has generated controversy, as a beloved artist disdained by many in the art world. According to The Australian, “Barry Pearce, the curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW, was the [...]
3 April 2006 | Contemporary
From Artnet: “Kathleen Gilje … known for her mastery of Old Master technique, has convinced a host of art-world movers and shakers — largely art critics, but also curators and art historians — to pose in the costume of art history masterpieces. Thus, Studio Museum in Harlem president Lowery Stokes Sims is shown in the [...]
29 March 2006 | Contemporary, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports from a talk given last night at the New School: “Regarding his apparent obsession with enormous breasts, Currin contended that it’s not simply about sex. ‘It’s a cartoony version of a classical idea of roundness and form. It’s about roundness having a place in contemporary art.’ ‘A lot of my work [...]
23 March 2006 | Books, Contemporary
According to Otto Karl Werckmeister’s new book, Der Medusa-Effekt: Politische Bildstrategien seit dem 11. September 2001, September 11 forced all images to occupy one of two spheres: “a non-public operational sphere in which images circulate around power [or] a public sphere of mere appearance in which only weak images succeed.” He concludes that “in the [...]
17 March 2006 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Independent curator Harald Szeemann was no mere administrator / catalogue-foreword-writer, but rather an art-world Macher, a creative author of exhibitions, and he practically invented the role. So writes Hans-Joachim Müller in his new book-length overview of Szeemann’s career. In the view of the Frankfurter Rundschau‘s Mirja Rosenau, one could go so far as to say [...]
10 March 2006 | Conferences, Contemporary
ARTnews editor Robin Cembalest reports for Nextbook on a recent panel devoted to “neosincerity,” the contemporary artistic and literary tendency that is “grounded in irony but allow[s] for the expression of sentiment and emotion, thanks to black humor, pratfalls, buffoonery, and other comic devices.” Cembalest reprints generous portions of the piquant conversation: “‘It’s really terrible [...]
8 March 2006 | Contemporary, Museums
In this week’s New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins writes: “Having devoted itself for 75 years to nurturing and celebrating American art, [the Whitney Museum] is now willing — or almost willing to concede that there is no such thing. Belief in a native American aesthetic has steadily eroded over the past three decades, as art has [...]
