Contemporary art, with it’s postmodern penchant for theory-riddled subtext and quirky aesthetics, doesn’t often fall under the category of “feel good” entertainment. That’s not a degradation, it’s a generalization by someone who looks at a lot of contemporary art. And nobody ever said that the role of art is solely to make the viewer feel good. However, when one comes across a series of work[…..]
Nostalgia is a word that means “a wistful desire to return” or “a sentimental yearning,” but from these cloying definitions one would never guess that the word originally meant “homesickness”. At its heart, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is nostalgic, but it is also complex and engaging without a hint of the saccharine. Nostalgia as homesickness is the distant light[…..]
For nearly a century, Disney’s eclectic assembly of animated characters have persisted the hopeful notion of Happily Ever After. (And the certitude that a duck without pants is always quick to anger.) Like modern-day mythology, Disney stories take seemingly ordinary characters and place them into extraordinary circumstances, through which they eventually persevere and often learn a lesson along the way. Boy meets genie and earns[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When they were newlyweds living in Switzerland, my grandparents met Terry Southern, the beatnik bad boy who would eventually co-write Easy Rider. My grandmother worked with Southern’s wife, Carol, at the United Nations nursery school in Geneva. Carol charmed her. “What a sport she was,” my grandmother remembers, “and a super gorgeous[…..]
Call and Response: Africa to America / The Art of Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo recently opened at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition brings together the work of two American artists intrigued by the formation of cultural identity and individual experience within a society. Drawing inspiration from the rich ceremonial traditions and elaborate guises of African nations, Nick[…..]
The press release for Jordan Kantor‘s self titled exhibition, currently on view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, provides readers with little more than a physical account of what the exhibition includes: “several paintings on canvas, some in oil, others in enamel, two looping slide projections,” etc. This type of opacity in the actual content of the show seemed frustrating at first, but after a[…..]
As DailyServing continues to expand our network of contributing writers and partnering websites to offer more global coverage of the visual arts, we are proud to bring you the first of a series of posts from our pals DaWire, a Puerto Rico-based global online magazine. Their recent article featuring new work by Oscar Carrasco at Luis Adelantado Valencia is featured below. In 2006 Oscar Carrasco[…..]
