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Warming over Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up Picasso takedown from 2018, “It’s Pablo-matic” undermines the Brooklyn Museum’s own staff and even gatekeeps the privileges of non-expertise.
A blockbuster survey at MoMA, New York, lauds video art as a democratic counter to hegemonic power. But with AI usurping its witness function with endless content invention, is “Signals” actually the medium’s post-mortem?
The cultish bravura of New York’s most in-crowd shit-poster led to predictions of an in-cinema shooting at the premiere. But reflecting a scene back at itself is not an insight into our incoherent condition – it’s a hype tactic.
The largest-ever retrospective of a living artist at the New Museum, New York charts Wangechi Mutu’s turn from the material resonance of found-object collages to the easy symbolic iterations of bronze sculpture.
Xiyadie, Sorting sweet potatoes (Dad, don't yell, we're in the cellar sorting sweet potatoes), 2019, papercut with water-based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 140 x 140 cm. All images courtesy: the artist
An exhibition of Xiyadie’s steamy papercuts at The Drawing Center, New York narrates his four-decade usurpation of a traditionalist folk form and a coming-out transition from shame to bliss.
For his October column, Dean Kissick writes a roundup of New York’s fall exhibitions. They are many, so many, and pleasant, so pleasant, as palliatives for a doomed dying world.
Violent videos fill up art shows, TikTok feeds, and telegram chats. This month, Dean Kissick wonders: how do we reckon with the chilling fog of content?
With nostalgia taking hold at The New Museum Triennial and MoMA PS1’s survey of Greater New York, Dean Kissick wonders: what’s so great about it? When art gets sucked back into tradition, where is the future to be found?
Have we blown past the point of Peak Identity? Continuing on the heels of last month’s column, Dean Kissick considers how memes and masks have superseded the performance of the self.
Are we human, or are we content? Dean Kissick ponders Demna Gvasalia, Donda, the cult of celebrity, and the actual occult in this month’s Downward Spiral.
Why does film – an art form built on stardom, visual pleasure, and control – have such a persistent sexual misconduct problem? It's an industry full of either monsters or geniuses, depending on who you ask.
With an uptick in breakthrough cases and breakups, what’s left in New York? The shambles of the Astor Place Kmart, some piecemeal conspiracy theories about who controls it all – models, probably – and the Friends Experience (not to be confused with having friends).
Good poetry and graceful aging might be casualties of the reality TV era, but at least we can all star in our own private dramas – or opt out and gossip anonymously.
Even in a summer of change, some things remain the same. NATASHA STAGG’s column is back. This week, for the first installment, she observes that certain constants – like FOMO and self-delusion – are here to stay.
Out Of State (part 8) is back in New York, and there NATASHA STAGG wonders about the future of the restaurant biz and all of the people that used to flock to the Big Apple for the good eats and parties. Did we see this coming?
DEAN KISSICK takes us through the troubled beginnings of the 2020s, charting his own history in New York, and the timeline of events of the previous decade that brought us here. Writing is the best cure for amnesia.
Get your black spandex tights and head down broadway musical memory lane with NATASHA STAGG in her seventh installment of OUT OF STATE. After the curtain drops, there's still New York behind any rendition of "New York, New York." Which is your favourite?
NATASHA STAGG’S third column focuses on speech acts, and the elected officials who seem incapable of delivering them with any eloquence. As the US just celebrated the 4th of July, maybe the fireworks will do a better job of speaking for New Yorkers than the old dudes behind a podium.
There’s so much mystery surrounding Austrian collective Gelatin’s The B-Thing that some believe it never really took place. This barely plausible architectural intervention on the ninety-first floor of the World Trade Center in 2000 was shown – once and once only – to a lucky handful of invited guests. Among them was artist Maria Hassabi, who witnessed the events on a Sunday morning in Lower Manhattan. By Maria Hassabi
The countryside is synonymous with the desires for escape, health, self-sustainability, and many other things that might well describe the current mood under the threat of corona. DEAN KISSICK weighs in on one exhibition that presents the nether reaches as just that: somewhere far away.
New York has been called Gotham, a modern Gomorrah, Empire City of the New World, the city of dreams, and the capital of the art world. If you fake it in here, you fake it anywhere, right? Rahel Aima on the immorality of New York.
George Maciunas founded one of the most influential art movements of the 20th century: Fluxus. Embodying its principle that art must not congeal, in everything he did he transformed the lives of artists and in so doing transformed the fate of SoHo. By Gerry Beegan
As New York's East Village is becoming host to a score of elite art organisations, the question of whether the local creativity they endorse is still alive and well comes to the fore. By Ariella Wolens
What does it mean today to have a life with kids, to have a life in art, and to live a life? Why are children and the artist's life so hard to unite? Or is this a false assumption? Spike Art Daily dedicates a series of interviews to the problematic relationship that the art industry has with its offspring. In this interview Lauren Boyle and Marco Roso, two of the four members of DIS, talk about why the concept of family is just "too much for the art world" and the differences between raising kids in Berlin and New York.
Lily van der Stokker's wall paintings and installations play on the decorative, the “nice” and the “girly”. Gossip, celebrity friends, and the always-dirty home find a place on the museum's walls, which become a diary full of colourful flowers and clouds. In this way, the artist has developed not only her own approach to image and text but also a feminist strategy: “Nonshouting Feminism” as she calls it.
Originally envisioned as a survey show of emerging artists, the fourth instalment of “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1 changes tract and raises the average artist age to a getting-on-a-bit 48. Through the more mature positions the difference between old New York and the “Post-Bloomburg iteration we’ve inherited” becomes startlingly clear. Musing on the inclusion of videos of drag performers by Nelson Sullivan and the cruising photographs of Alvin Baltrop, our writer gets nostalgic for the salad days of NYC.
Many people are anxious that the growing class divide in the art world and the succession of record-breaking prices paid for contemporary art endanger the belief system supporting it. But why is nobody worried about money itself? Isn’t what happens at an auction that money celebrates its freedom, its release from the burden of being a means of comparison? Is art the new money? On a currency that lives from the bank of the gaze, into which we all make payments.
It was one of the biggest meetings of art and pop culture in the last ten years. But was it also a game changer? And what were the consequences for the participants? When Jay-Z adapted Marina Abramović's performance "The Artist is Present" (2010) for his video "Picasso Baby" at New York's Pace Gallery in 2013, many wondered: how did Abramović end up here? New York’s art scene was the audience, with Abramović herself as the star. Looking back, Marina wonders this too. At her recent retrospective at SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, she openly discussed the drawbacks of having replaced the physical, face-to-face encounter with the camera, and having become a brand.
The New York-based Norwegian artist is drawn to big subjects – violence, sexuality, destruction, aging, self-expression. His exhibitions are dense installations packed with paintings, sculptures, readymades, photographs, and contributions from friends working with art, design, or literature. Jennifer Krasinski speaks to him about the visual dimension of writing, the death drive in homosexuality, and the irrelevance of cultural relevance.
For many visitors, Jordan Wolfson’s robot represents a first contact with the most technologically developed and also most disturbing robot they have ever seen. But can the gallery space do justice to the experience? After all, a robot is only as evil as the world into which it is placed.
