Not too long ago, I spoke with Howard Rutkowski, formerly of Sotheby’s and now director of Fortune Cookie Projects, intending to satiate my curiosity about art auctions and art dealing. While he probably scoffed at my naivety, he candidly said to me, “Plunging into the murky business of the art world is akin to swimming with the sharks. There’s a delicate dance that takes place[…..]
It’s not that Michaela Eichwald doesn’t give a crap about her paintings; she just beats the shit out of them. It’s part of a lengthy weathering process that imbues them with the perfect balance of attraction and repulsion. Before they get to the gallery, they’ve been stepped on, left out in the rain, randomly stained, and often chemically altered. Eichwald decimates boring oil painting clichés[…..]
The biggest snow job in history is how high art in Western culture has largely been about ogling T&A under the guise of mythological allegory. Work by academic art stars like Bouguereau and Cabanel from the Paris Salon look like soft-core porn, and everybody knows that old master subjects like The Three Graces and The Judgement Of Paris are mostly a front for putting the[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley There are many ways to mask yourself, some more effective than others, and artists—the good ones—venture further into the business of masking than most. They’re also deep into unmasking, balancing the urge to reveal with the need to conceal. This is a more pragmatic than emotional project; even if artists tend to[…..]
Babak Golkar is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice, at its fundamental roots, takes aim to deconstruct, recontextualize and rearrange our perceptions of the world around us. Like Zen koans, Golkar’s work seems to arrive at new understandings by setting up impossible questions. At it’s core is a spirit of unbridled philosophical investigation; one that exhibits a Duchampian twist on the visual pun mixed with a[…..]
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[…..]
When I first heard that Kadar Brock was using Dungeons and Dragons dice as engines of chance to determine the elements in his new paintings, I was as suspicious of it as I am of mullets on the L Train. I’d seen his work in several recent group shows, but it didn’t really stick with me until I saw Night Fishing at Thierry Goldberg Projects[…..]
