A grocery list of current art reviews, criticism, and journalism to keep you up to date. Read one or read them all! Just, please, read something.
October 10, 2019: The new MoMA is a lot bigger. But you may not learn as much about the art. – The Washington Post
Since the Museum of Modern Art moved to 53rd Street in 1939, it has been expanded several times, gobbling up whatever space it could find in one of this country’s densest urban neighborhoods. It has also struggled over the past decade with extraordinary demand, with some years topping more than 3 million annual visitors.
October 10, 2019: The New MoMA Tries to Get Out of Its Own Way. We’ll See If It Can. – New York Magazine
Touring the almost empty megamuseum shortly before the crowds arrive unsettles me with déja vu. Fifteen years ago, I wandered through another new, still vacant MoMA and was enchanted by Taniguchi’s meticulous cool. Without the distraction of other visitors, I could pay attention to walls that appeared to levitate just above the floor, and the deftness with which all the usual messy protuberances — vents, switches, knobs, cables — had been subdued into near nonexistence.
October 10, 2019: Embracing Mortality in the Face of Big Tech’s Domination – Hyperallergic
The American futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that humans will achieve immortality by the year 2045 in a process known as the Singularity. This notion has gained significant traction in the tech world. Kurzweil is currently the Director of Engineering at Google, and in 2011 the Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov began funding the “2045 Movement.” Itskov’s project aims to transfer our personalities into carriers superior to the human body.
October 10, 2019: Why I Find It Comical and Sort of Contradictory that Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway Has Become One of the SAAM’s Most Instragramable Pieces – Grocery Magazine
A friend of mine from North Carolina posted an Instagram story recently standing in front of Korean-born artist Nam June Paik’s epic Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The accompanying text read: “I heard all the cool DC girls post pictures here.” Honestly, fair. Paik’s masterful, massive work, one of many complicated and compelling electronic sculptures by Paik, has assumed a second life in the age of Instagram. Well before that, though, it was a pioneering, domineering force of aesthetic commentary.
October 9, 2019: Can institutions tell their own stories? Yes, if they learn to think like a museum. – The Washington Post
The history of the world isn’t made just by political or military leaders, but by people who gather to form corporations, associations, confraternities, churches, temples and mosques, and organizations that cater to our desire for art, entertainment and play. Each of these has its impact on history and generates its own institutional history, stored in archives and sometimes warehouses, though often discarded along the way. The narrative of this vast realm of life, which falls into the fertile ground between public and private space, is both essential and often ephemeral, and very often is never woven into the larger fabric of our past simply because no one thinks to gather it, save it and study it.
October 10, 2019: Gemini Man‘s CGI Will Smith is Too Much to Handle – City Paper
A movie has to do a million things well to succeed, but sometimes it only has to do one thing badly to fail. Take Gemini Man, in which Will Smith plays an assassin doing battle with a younger, digitally rendered clone of himself: The film is understandably being marketed on the strength of its groundbreaking visual effects, primarily a de-aging technique that has been featured in previous films, but never with such significant screen time. In Gemini Man, we’re looking at a CGI young Will Smith for a solid hour, and he doesn’t come close to resembling a human being. We know what the Fresh Prince looks like, and this ain’t it, so the movie falls apart every time he’s in it.
October 10, 2019: Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun: Reframing Abstract Expressionism Unites Two Great Women Artists – City Paper
Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun: Reframing Abstract Expressionism quickly addresses its truths: Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun never shared a studio, didn’t work together, weren’t friends, and didn’t live in the same town. The two also had scant communication. On a couple of occasions Herzbrun wrote Hartigan to entice her to teach at American University, which Hartigan rejected. And, in 1974, Herzbrun sent Jack Rasmussen, then a student, to Hartigan’s Baltimore studio to curate a show for American University’s now defunct Watkins Gallery. As Rasmussen recalled, Hartigan curated her show.
October 8, 2019: Five Things that Confuse Me about the Freer Sackler Gallery’s Apparent Guilt-By-Association in the Whole Sackler Scandal – Grocery Magazine
Let’s begin by affirming our commitment to the facts: that the Sacklers have catapulted themselves into an echelon of unbelievable wealth; and that their launching pad for this generational ascent was built, carefully and furtively, on the misery of an army of opioid-addicted Americans. The centrality of this fact shouldn’t be downplayed or sidestepped. Of course, the centrality of misery in amassing family fortune is not exclusive to the Sacklers, either. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
October 6, 2019: Oligarchs, as U.S. Arts Patrons, Present a Softer Image of Russia – New York Times
Vladimir O. Potanin, a Russian billionaire who made his fortune in banking and natural resources, has been a donor and board member of the Guggenheim Museum since 2002. More recently he gave $6.45 million to the Kennedy Center in Washington, which used some of the money to install the “Russian Lounge,” a meeting space, in the performing arts complex created, in part, by Congress. His name is now inscribed on a wall there.
October 5, 2019: Looking at the Roots of the Bauhaus – Hyperallergic
I had few expectations walking into the exhibition Bauhaus Beginnings, now on view at the Getty Research Institute, Getty Center Los Angeles. After all, what could be more antithetical to the buoyant creativity embodied by the Bauhaus than the Getty’s Ivory Tower looming above the 405 Freeway? But strange as it might seem, Bauhaus Beginnings manages to capture not only this iconic school’s freewheeling spirit, but its democratic mode of artistic production as well.
October 5, 2019: Kara Walker’s Monument to Monstrousness – Hyperallergic
The public monuments of a great city such as London are objects which we both see and do not see. The not-seeing is, in part, a choice, and in part a response to the facts that these things are too familiar to be seen.
October 3, 2019: Jenny Holzer’s Moving Memorials – Grocery Magazine
When Jenny Holzer was a student in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1977, she conceived of her massively popular installation series, Truisms. At the time, Holzer was reading expansively in both philosophy and literature. The phrases that she chose for her project were meant to be neither moralizing or political: instead, she said that aimed to create a “Jenny Holzer’s Reader’s Digest of Western and Eastern Thought” to decontextualize “everything that could be right or wrong with the world.” The project took the form of maxims and phrases, ranging the practical to the evocative: “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” received no more context or discussion than “A solid home builds a sense of self.” With this project, Holzer wanted to insert art forcibly into the daily lives of her audience, which is to say, into the daily lives of ordinary people. There was no rarified or self-selected art audience for her work, and although the project was heavily conceptual in its process, its goals were, seemingly, simple: make people think, and blur the line between text and art.
October 3, 2019: Delight in Bob Ross’ Happy Accidents at the Franklin Park Arts Center – City Paper
The drive to Franklin Park Performing and Visual Arts Center in Purcellville, Virginia, is as scenic and full of nature as one of Bob Ross’ paintings. The gorgeous greenery and farmland are signs of what’s to come at the center.
October 3, 2019: Brutal in DC: Metro Architecture – Grocery Magazine
Did you know that the DC Metro’s highest ridership for a single day was on the day of the first inauguration of Barack Obama, January 20, 2009, with 1,120,000 riders? Or that the highest ridership for a Saturday was on January 21, 2017, the 2017 Women’s March, with 1,001,616 trips? I like to think about all those millions of riders, equating DC Metro’s architecture with some deeper, cultural truth about our city, in the same way that I do with, say, New York or Paris’ respective undergrounds. But how deeply entwined is the DC Metro in DC’s cultural heritage and history?
October 2, 2019: What the Hell Was Modernism? The Museum of Modern Art tries to open itself up. – Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine
Kids sport tattoos of artworks by Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Edvard Munch, Piet Mondrian, and Andy Warhol (you might not think of him as a modernist, but we’ll get to that). Our cities are crowded with glass-walled luxury riffs on high-modernist architecture, the apartments inside full of knockoffs of “mid-century-modern” furniture. Donald Judd’s sleepy minimalist studio outpost in Marfa is now East Hampton in West Texas, a secular pilgrimage site for millionaire collectors, full of expensive restaurants and fancy second homes. As recently as 1994, my wife and I were offered a house there for $5,000.
Septemer 17, 2019: The Warmth of Other Suns at The Phillips Collection – East City Art
The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement spans three floors of The Philips Collection’s annex and includes the work of 75 artists. The artworks speak to the displacement and migration of people in several countries and focus on the twentieth century through the present.
August 20, 2019: Stephanie Mercedes on Gun Violence – East City Art
In the past few weeks, numerous mass shootings have made headlines stirring yet another public outcry for an end to gun violence in America. At the time of this writing, there have been approximately 262 mass shootings in 2019, a number higher than the number of days in the year, 231. The District of Columbia has its own gun-related problems: 84 of 105 homicides this year were the result of shootings. In mid-July, illegally-obtained guns killed seven people within one week. Aside from becoming more involved in activism and politics, what is one to do with this constant trauma and shock? How does one begin to deal with this grief?
GROCERY 