Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art. 1.62K
I’m noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum’s ‘Younger Than Jesus’ last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I’m seeing it blossom and bear fruit at ‘Greater New York,’ MoMA P.S. 1’s twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent. 2.19K
My culture-deprived, aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb – where the word art never came up – to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it. 660
Abstract Expressionism – the first American movement to have a worldwide influence – was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you’ll find a would-be Willem de Kooning). 1.31K
The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city’s magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. 681
It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He’s the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed. 2.38K
I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn’s work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn’t simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved ‘isms’ and twists. 662
Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off. 820
Imagine it’s 1981. You’re an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You’re also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to; art history just isn’t that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language. 665
Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise – all are now the norm, often edging out much else. 597
Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn’t any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument. 757
Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There’s likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block – West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues – than in all of Amsterdam’s or Hamburg’s galleries. 582
Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism. 2.45K
Not to say people shouldn’t get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic. 650
First let me report that the art in the Barnes Collection has never looked better. My trips to the old Barnes were always amazing, but except on the sunniest days, you could barely see the art. The building always felt pushed beyond its capacity. 645
There’s something pleasing about large, well-lit spaces. I love that dealers are willing to take massive chances in order to give this much room to their artists. Most of all, I love that more galleries showing more art gives more artists a shot. 758
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. 599
Although all the good arts serve to draw man’s mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure. 736
