What Meets the Eye

Artistic License at the Guggenheim Part: 1

August 14, 2019

A tip: Don’t elevator up and walk down. By walking up the ramp you start with each artist/curator’s stated modus operandi. Thinking about curating in this show and beyond it is the way to get deeply into the exhibition. Explicit in some [...]

The Whitney Biennial 2019: Is it Safe?

July 7, 2019

“…elegant but safe portrait of right now.” Andrew Russeth, Art News “…why is this year’s show so safe?” Nadja Savej, The Guardian “…missing a radical spirit” and “Some artists in the show [...]

Bel Fullana and the Rape of Isla Bonita

June 13, 2019

Does All inclusive look like a display of “playful sexual freedom” to you? This painting and the other two paintings in this essay are described that way in the gallery press release, which also employs forms of the words “ambiguity” and [...]

Bellinger Battles Elemental Forces, Sfraga Furthers Evolution

June 3, 2019

The two predominant modes of categorizing paintings are describing them as abstract or figurative, and pronouncing them to be more “realistic” if closer to a photographic image. Neither is of any use in considering Len Bellinger’s work (or [...]

Jasper Johns Talks to Me

April 16, 2019

Often in the last year upon awakening, but with my eyes still closed, I see myself sobbing. The death of a friend, white supremacists, climate change, I don’t even know. But more about that in a minute. I’m not getting critics who see painting [...]

Adam Simon and Object Constancy

March 28, 2019

After dropping my wife at the A train, it was too early for Harry’s* and I passed McDonalds, thinking about Simon’s show, the ultra-recognizability of the golden arches and stopping off for a sausage biscuit and how wrong that would be—my age! [...]

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the “Sweetness of Doing Nothing”*

March 24, 2019

As you know if you follow my remarks at all, I’m no fan of the hasty painters and the painting-a-day folks, in which camp Yiadom-Boakye squarely resides. But Holy Provocations is a wonderful surprise, a painting in which one person looks [...]

Dana Schutz and a World of Anxiety

February 26, 2019

After conversations with other painters about this show, the consensus seemed to be admiration for Schutz’s work as a whole, for the energy and ambition and the mad rush of it—and not so much about individual paintings, what they are about, [...]

Maya Brym, the Pleasures of Occultation* and Illusion

January 26, 2019

*“Occultation,” used primarily in astronomy to describe the passage of one celestial body in front of another, also means interposition, overlapping in laymen’s terms—one object blocks another. This is the main monocular clue to depth [...]

Wrestling, in the Dark, with Delacroix

January 8, 2019

Delacroix does not “do it for me.” Btw, have you heard “Lord, Do It For Me,” with its increasingly fervent request? The James Cleveland version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daKpXBT6vyA However, he did it for Van Gogh and other [...]