Tag: 04.09.06

Dorment: The Whitney’s Bold Biennial

Richard Dorment wasn’t expecting much of this year’s Whitney Biennial after reading all the bad reviews. “Certainly the squalor and violence about which American critics complained is everywhere in evidence, but I can’t think of a greater contrast than between the Whitney’s direct, visceral response to what is happening in America today and the tepid, neoconceptual navel-gazing going on at Tate Britain.”

Havana Hardship

Being a serious artist in Cuba is no easy matter, even though dictator Fidel Castro has made a point of using Cuban culture to soften his government’s image abroad. “Throughout the city, museums have been refurbished, and installed with many politically charged works that speak both for and against the revolution, displays that seem to demonstrate the government’s tolerance of dissenting voices.” But beneath the surface, artists struggle for approval of their exhibitions, shows are canceled without warning, and the shadow of El Presidente looms large over every new work.

Chicago’s Newest Star

“At the age of 36, the Chicago playwright Lydia R. Diamond has suddenly drilled her way out of a respectable but muted Midwestern career. This month, this articulate and self-revealing African-American scribe has two world premieres in simultaneous production at respected Chicago theaters — a highly unusual and impressive feat. And Chicago is by no means the end of it. On a national level, she’s white-hot.”

The Neverending Battle Over Modernism

Modernism absorbs a lot of body blows these days, and one UK critic recently claimed that the art movement was responsible for “more human misery than anything else in history.” Hyperbole aside, though, was modernism really a bad thing? “The arguments boil down to claims that Modernism was inhuman, authoritarian and technically inept. But if it was really so bad, and if it was really confined to a tiny and irrelevant coterie, why does it look so good [in museum shows today,] and why was it so all-pervasive in its influence? Above all, why are its critics still so worried about it?”

Modernist Redux

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that modernism is back in a big way. From the much-celebrated iPod to Frank Gehry’s shiny monoliths to “all the chrome-and-leather furniture and cubic shelving that sells to our most fashion-forward loft dwellers: It was all first dreamed up in the 1920s or before.”

Blue Skies Are So Overrated

“Spring at last feels sprung, and most Britons are gazing upwards, searching for blue skies. But not all – a growing minority are speaking up in defence of clouds. Cloud lovers now have a spiritual home, the Cloud Appreciation Society, with billowing membership and a UK website that won the recent Yahoo award for Weird and Wonderful Site of the Year.”

America’s Ghost State

Grandiose pronouncements about the glory of the great open West aside, there really aren’t many places in America anymore that could truly be considered underpopulated. And when desolation does exist, it is rarely that poetic type of desolation described in flowery novels. More often, it is the quietly desperate solitude of a place like North Dakota, which has been losing people for decades, and may be on the verge of becoming America’s first wholly forsaken state. “But even as the American small town continues what often seems like an irresistible decline, some in northwest North Dakota are mounting a resistance, an organized effort to draw people — new people, young people, families — to their small towns.”

If It Works, They’ll Install A Few Warhols In The Food Court

Video art frequently has trouble finding a permanent place in traditional museums and galleries. So why not try displaying it somewhere else? In, say, a shopping mall? “Encouraged by the popularity of their free summer film series, which featured James Bond movies one year and Marilyn Monroe pictures another, managers of [a suburban Colorado mall] have begun screening classic video art in their courtyard.”