Frieze New York, up and running through Monday, is a fashionista’s wet dream of what an art fair ought to be. Take a look if you want to know how the people who buy and sell contemporary paintings and whatnots are amusing themselves right now. Set in a meandering white tent on Randall’s Island in the East River—it’s just a quick taxi ride (or Frieze-organized bus or ferry ride) from Manhattan—Frieze New York is our Gilded Age art world’s answer to the perfect Edwardian country house party. The bleached-chic style can make ignorance and mendacity look pretty. READ MORE >>
Let this be fair warning: You will not see Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, that most recklessly zany of all Pop Art creations, in the exhibition currently at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store.” This is not exactly through any fault of Ann Temkin, the curator in charge. READ MORE >>
No Trouble at All
The problem with critics' praise of Piero della Francesca's Frick show
The rapture that has greeted “Piero della Francesca in America,” at the Frick Collection, is a bit much. Reactions to this unquestionably beautiful gathering of seven paintings by the fifteenth-century Italian master are so hushed and reverent that I find myself wondering if people are transfixed by the paintings or by their participation in what has been widely recognized as this season’s perfect little museum show. Don’t get me wrong. I have no wish to be a killjoy. READ MORE >>
Life and Art in Steinberg, Hockney, and Wojnarowicz
Three new biographies that retell the lives but don't explain the creativity
For biographers, who give a person’s life a second life by putting it between covers, the ever-diminishing shelf life of books has to have a particular poignancy. It was only the day before yesterday that new biographies of three artists of our time appeared, and yet those lives of David Hockney, Saul Steinberg, and David Wojnarowicz, each of which has been received with generosity and attentiveness, are already off the stage. READ MORE >>
Can a weakly conceived and poorly executed exhibition be unforgettable? That is how I would describe my reaction to “Art at War”—“L’art en guerre: France 1938-1947”—the big show about French art during the German Occupation that I caught on the day it was closing in Paris; it opens next week at the Guggenheim Bilbao, where it runs through the summer. READ MORE >>
Photography in an Age of Smartphones
When photography is everywhere, when is it art?
Is photography dying? No, not exactly. But the mysteries of the darkroom are by some accounts nearly extinct. And in the age of the smartphone, the art of photography sometimes seems to be vanishing in a cloud of digitalization, with the formal concerns that used to absorb even the sophisticated amateur dissolving as all images become more or less equal. READ MORE >>
If Ai Weiwei, the much admired Chinese dissident artist, were a character in a novel, I would know exactly what to think about him. I would regard him as a fascination, at once formidable and absurd, courageous and disingenuous, unquestionably brilliant and downright moronic. I would take in stride the outlandish paradoxes that are integral to his reputation. READ MORE >>
