Artist and provocateur William Powhida — who once predicted the post-boom odds of fellow contemporaries like Dash Snow — has issued a challenge to the New Museum on Bowery in his latest piece, which graces the cover of this month’s Brooklyn Rail. As an emerging artist in New York, Powhida’s satires of the art world cognoscenti hit close to home, and the skewering of the only museum in town that tries to cater to young artists and patrons is gutsy, to say the least. His drawing “How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality” depicts all the usual suspects, from Jeff Koons and critics Paddy Johnson and Tyler Green to museum director Lisa Phillips and curator Massimiliano Gioni. Urs Fischer, whose one-man show currently occupies floors two through four, is referenced as well, though we beg to differ that his exhibition “Margeurite de Ponty” is contributing to the NuMu’s so-called “self-injury.” See why, after the jump.
Read More »
We’ve been running into the “is it art?” question a lot recently. Sure — it’s been lingering unanswered since Marcel Duchamp plunked a urinal down at the Armory Show, but people seem especially bewildered this month. They handwringing started at the beginning of March when Jeremy Deller opened It Is What It Is, a series of conversations about the Iraq war that looked very unlike, say, a Renoir. Fair enough. We weren’t sure if it was art either. Then Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes asked if the collection of historically important photography at MoMA, which includes pictures of Abu Ghraib and Vietnam, could possibly be considered art. We were equally conflicted. Even the New Yorker wanted to know if the BMW Art Cars were art. Who knows — art or not we wouldn’t kick one out of our garage (if we had a garage to begin with).
In the spirit of the times, we wanted to know how many people can discern a Polaroid of drunk kids at a party from one of Dash Snow and his friends that debuted at the Saatchi Gallery. So play along with us. After the jump, let us know if you can tell which of the following images are intended to be art and which aren’t.
Read More »
There’s a moment in this interesting T.J. Clark interview about the noted art historian’s upcoming “Picasso and Truth” series at the National Gallery of Art (which starts March 22) that feels like he could be discussing works created in today’s environment rather than the mid-to-late ’20s:
“Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that’s intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions. You won’t be surprised to hear that from me, as I’m someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I’m very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That’s under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it’s under threat.) Massively under-threat.”
Weird, right? We’ve read tons of articles in the mainstream media about how the economy is affecting the art market, but not so much about how it might be influencing actual content. Do you think we’ll see a resurgence of the Cubist aesthetic (or a contemporary reinterpretation) now that we’re facing a similar crisis? Is it already happening?
Side note: Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green says that Clark’s lectures will be available via podcast with details TBA.
Last week we told you about Bernie Madoff indirectly sinking Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. Now Modern Art Notes is pointing us to story about a similar (albeit less all encompassing) situation going down at the University of Iowa Art Museum, regarding the forced sale of a Jackson Pollock painting that’s worth $140m.
Read More »
