Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. I’m a professional curator with over a decade of experience, mostly as a salaried professional. I’d like to be doing more freelance curatorial work, but curators seem to either get paid nothing, absurdly little, or astronomical sums.[…..]

We always like to see artist Mark Bradford’s name pop up in the press. Of course, there’s the fantastic news that Bradford will be representing the U.S. in this year’s Venice Biennale, in addition to last week’s cheekily delivered critique of art auctions (while onsite at Christie’s). Today, we’re republishing Bean Gilsdorf’s meditations on the tactility of Bradford’s work in relation to textiles. This article[…..]

Today, from our friends at REORIENT, we bring you a review of Ghazel’s latest solo exhibition, Mea Culpa, on view at Carbon 12 in Dubai through May 9. Author Sayantan Mukhopadhyay says of the artist, “Her interventions—which start with materials and symbols inherently laden with meaning—speak about the itinerant lives in a manner that is refreshing when placed in conversation with the many other contemporaneous works[…..]

Robert Mapplethorpe is forever associated with scandals that erupted at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, as well as the crippling drawdown of federal funding that rendered the National Endowment for the Arts a casualty of the late-1980s culture wars. More recently, Mapplethorpe, or the foundation that bears his name, made headlines with two significant acquisitions made by the J.[…..]

The Juilliard-trained musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, the so-called topless cellist, never shied away from the spotlight. In addition, as a monographic exhibition at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art demonstrates, Moorman’s work as a cunning and forceful impresario contributed significantly to the international visibility of New York’s burgeoning avant-garde music scene beginning in the ’60s. A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte[…..]

Sarah Rara is a Los Angeles–based artist who works with video, film, photography, and performance. She is also a contributing member of the band Lucky Dragons. Rara was most recently an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, where she worked on a new video, Broken Solar, and a libretto for a new opera, Neglected Treaty, that considers the sonic impacts of climate change[…..]

Up-and-coming Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans continues his interest in symbology with Motif (Oil and Silver) at Marc Foxx. His paintings and sculptures investigate rostral columns, whales, Roman shipping vessels, coinage, and Coco Chanel, among other seemingly unconnected imagery. About a dozen works, tastefully arranged, point to linkages both literal and figurative. The first series of paintings, Coco, Chain (She Loves Pink, Juicy Details, Guava Jelly,[…..]