Christopher Knight lecture

pics:tryharder

Christopher Knight lecture at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica.....also starring John Baldessari in the front row. Did anyone bring up Deitch...nope. Oh well, at least they covered "the internet."

gone to san diego for the weekend

I'm headed south for the weekend. So, here are some review tactics to chew on:

"Does anyone like Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition at David Zwirner? Past endless Facebook debate, and slams from major publications, the only positive reviews I’ve read (if you can call them that) are descriptive....
As a general rule of thumb I tend not to respond to this kind of art – having the shit scared out of me due to an empathetic response isn’t what I look for from an artist..." Paddy Johnson/AFC

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"...Either way, the artist failed to make a successful painting...Similarly, the awkward handling seems more forgivable, if for no other reason than the pubescent subjects suffer from corresponding problems." Paddy Johnson/The L Magazine

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"...The tape freaked me out, turned me off, and even outraged me...I looked, I shuddered, I passed on to the next disappointing work, not giving the moral dimensions of Usine too much thought...Still, I did come away from the Abdessemed piece knowing more than ever that I don’t believe in certainty, that even though the work wasn’t good, I was snagged by the paradox it raised about what kills what..." Jerry Saltz/NYMag

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"Someday the Museum of Modern Art will be filled with nothing but flat screen televisions projecting slow moving, high definition video paintings for the delectation of future generations who never heard of Picasso...If artists like Mik truly believed the grimness of their production, they would all rot in their beds." Charlie Finch/artnet

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"Later this month, the artist [Kate Gilmore] will decamp to Miami, where she plans to hurl herself to the bottom of a very deep ditch, then try to get out. 'I’m nervous about that one,' says Gilmore, who’s been lifting weights and bulking up in preparation. 'I’ll get out. It may not be the way I want to get out, it may not be pretty, but I’ll get out. Hopefully.'" Amy Laroc/NYMag

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"MATTHEW COLLINGS: How deep should art be?
SATAN: It should be deep Matt, very deep indeed.
You say it so glibly as if you don't take the question seriously.
I don't.
Well where do you get your reputation for knowledge, your evil wisdom -- the ability to see within everyone?
I live in a place of ice, freezing, really unpleasant, and in there I'm eating the bodies of the great betrayers, Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed Julius Caesar, and Judas, who betrayed Jesus. I'm eating them forever. For eternity -- it's Hell - the worse place. I'm always thinking while eating. And over the centuries people have realised I have certain insights. But I don't think about the art world much.
What shows have you seen recently?
I hardly ever go any more..." Matthew Collings/Saatchi Online

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PUT DOWNS AND SUCK UPS: MATTHEW COLLINGS' WEEKLY VENTINGS ABOUT THE ART WORLD NO 20: ART WRITING
"Should art writing be high-minded and refined, with a lot of honing, corrections and rethinks, or should it be spontaneous like a blog? Should it be self-indulgent or earnestly careful and considered? If it's the latter does it run the risk of being sterile and boring? And is the problem of the former that while venting can be entertaining it kind of lowers the tone of the whole thing generally, the whole thing being this great enterprise, art, with all its philosophical, aesthetical, moral and ethical meanings? Who does it anyway? Art writing I mean. Are they failures and losers? What would they be if they were winners? Artists, yes, of course, but what are artists, what on earth do they do? What is art now that the olden-days stuff is over? Contemporary art: this ragbag of hustling bullshit -- steady on! ..." Matthew Collings/Saatchi Online

Headline of the Day: What's the point of art criticism?

What is the point of art criticism?
It's easy to dismiss it as trivial entertainment, but today's culture of gallery obsession and mediocre art being talked up by fools makes art criticism more crucial than ever
–jonathan jones blog/guardian

nice flashy title but fluffy, obvious information (read the headline, skim to the bottom and then think for yourself.) what really gets me going is when "critics" act only as press agents: insert gallery name here, describe show here and make one vague statement about the overall direction here. with the old breed of ink-stained pseudo-scholars in the hole (papers/mags lay off art writers first, obviously) and a vast world of bloggers, i have yet to find a trustworthy, reliable batch of emerging critics. even the (in)famous jerry saltz posed the same question on his facebook page, asking who you read for art criticism, getting a number of results, all of whom i believe to still be hit or miss. maybe blame it on too much information/art/news out there to really focus, or is it just tepid reviewing? i think there is uncharted territory for criticism coming - if art can grow so too can the way we write about it.

how many times have i said the same....

it had to be said

"In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their esthetic heads up the esthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism and institutional critique. Before the schadenfreud-aholics concur, I am not talking about artists like Wade Guyton, Kelly Walker or Josh Smith, all of whom deploy the above artists in optically original and intellectually complex ways, but hordes of wannabe followers who do so in safely imitative unoriginal ways. These second-stringers have spawned a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played...

'Younger' should be much more exciting than it is. For long stretches it is just the same old rote conceptualism and latest iterations on retreaded ideas (curators everywhere love this kind of art). The show is filled with frustrating moments, most of which occur when the curators conform too completely to biennial habit, choosing art that follows standard conventions of late-late-late conceptualism...

'Younger than Jesus' indicates that the alchemical essence known as the sublime, the primal buzz of it all, is no longer in God or nature or abstraction. These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal. Art is being reanimated by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is breaking free. Even the New Museum itself, founded in 1977, is 'younger than Jesus.' Since it reopened in December 2007, it’s become, despite its clinical spaces and a couple of misfires, the most consistently challenging, polemical art institution in the city. It, like the art in this show and everywhere, is being reborn." Jerry Saltz
"JESUS" SAVES

how did I let this one slip by me...let's take a look at the new work...

A little bit of the old...


and a little bit of experimentation...


leads to some new developments.
Knowing Schutz's works up close (usually containing a splattering of thick, bright globes of paint) I can't even begin to judge the successfulness of the recent batch, and will leave it up to Roberta. PS: someone tell Zach Feuer that less is more.

Dana Schutz: Missing Pictures
Zach Feuer Gallery, through April 25
Roberta Smith:
"Dana Schutz’s new paintings look a tad better on the gallery’s Web site than in person. Compression helps, which suggests the larger, more complicated canvases might be better at two-thirds size and that the bright colors could be intensified. Or maybe their complexity of palette and composition is not mutually enhancing; these canvases need to get away from one another. Still, Ms. Schutz deserves credit for not repeating herself. She continues her ambitious exploration of color, technique and history, both political and painterly..."
pics: zach feuer

let's all fly to NY

By Jerry Saltz

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don't worry LA...we still have the Hammer. wink.

AIDS-3D, ''OMG Obelisk,'' 2007. MDF, electroluminescent wire, steel, hot glue, acrylic paint and fire. Courtesy the New Museum.

ticket booth

"...Several Fridays ago, I spent an hour reading the 875 years between A.D. 38,658 and A.D. 39,533. It was one of the odder hours I’ve ever spent in a gallery..." Saltz from:
Reeling In the Years: On Kawara’s latest show calls for participants to read long lists of dates. Sounds easy, right?

Read it! Jerry makes you feel that you are living the piece through him.

making a list...

don't miss jerry's best of 2008 list in ny mag!
• The Year in Superlatives
• The Top Nine Shows (and One Event)

now that's a review...yeeesh

From FAME-FUCKING AND OTHER FRIVOLITIES
by Donald Kuspit
...Warhol was the first fame-fucker, and Peyton follows in his tracks -- she’s the latest Warhol wanna-be -- down to the fact that her portraits are often based on photographs, like his. And like his, they look like cosmeticized canvases rather than paintings.
...Warhol understood that fame is a social fig leaf on personal vacuousness. Peyton thinks it is the fullness of being, showing how shallow her understanding of celebrity is compared to Warhol’s. His awareness that fame dies -- thus the fame of his death imagery -- was his way of debunking it. Peyton blindly embraces it, not knowing it is the kiss of death. Thus she is the victim of fame rather than its master, like Warhol.
...Warhol mocked the cult of celebrity even as he became a celebrity -- thus the odd note of self-defeat in his celebrity portraits -- while Peyton wallows in it, suggesting that she is as permanently immature as the adolescent mind she panders to. Her art is a case of arrested development -- esthetically as well as humanly -- while Warhol’s art is cynically mature, and as such addressed to critical consciousness, despite itself.

your own personal smoking station

The smoking booths at Frieze Art Fair by artist Norma Jeane (pic nytimes)

Review of Frieze by Roberta here