Category: visual

“At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. Wherever critics are paid to gather (you wouldn’t catch us in the same room otherwise), they go on about the crisis.”

Armed thieves stole about 30 masterpieces, by Monet and Rodin among others, from an art dealer’s home near Paris, Agence France-Presse reported, citing the police.

“If Polaroids were a movie, they’d be ‘The Truman Show.’ If they were novels, Philip K. Dick would have written them. How much you want to bet all the pictures in R. Buckminster Fuller’s family albums are Polaroids? They’re obsolete and futuristic at the same time, which is a hard trick to pull off, but the glory – and downfall – of Polaroid was managing to do it.”

“American art, as Robert Hughes has written, oscillates between dependence and invention. You could also say that it can’t, or couldn’t, decide just how American it ought to be. On the one hand were those who believed in the transcendency of the landscape; painters who saw manifest destiny in the Hudson River or Niagara Falls, and those all-American originals like Peto and Homer. On the other were those Modernists touched by Europe.”

“This show comes at a restless, discontented moment. Institutional critique has become an institutional style, and the socioartistic movement known as “relational aesthetics”–that is, art that’s all about your own relationship to being in public with it–has gone mainstream. Most in the art world want more than that.”

The critical consensus is that this year’s Whitney Biennial is another bland, high-profile flop. But Simon Houpt says that the conventional wisdom might be overlooking the Whitney’s clever embrace of America’s peculiar national position. “Much of this year’s exhibition mulls breakdowns: of political, economic, social or artistic theories; of civil engineering; of common sense.”

Italy’s relationship with art has become increasingly bizarre and hard to understand. “The state still thinks of culture almost exclusively in terms of antiquities,” but a whole series of museums designed to house contemporary art are springing up. “Every institution is a one-person project; otherwise nothing happens. There’s no structure, no official culture of expertise.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has acquired a potentially valuable parcel of land across Wilshire Boulevard from it’s main campus. Now, what does LACMA plan to do with this acquisition? That depends on who you ask, but Christopher Hawthorne writes that the possibilities are fascinating…

“Chinese artists have at their disposal a more diverse range of cultural nourishment and references. They have experienced more trials and tribulations than artists in other regions; and more than artists of any other region, today’s Chinese artists have an easier path to success. I don’t mean success in the market sense, but in an artistic sense.”

Detroit Institute of Arts director Graham Beal has not left the museum, despite an awkwardly phrased story in Wednesday’s New York Times that might leave that impression.