A Response to Adam Lehrer’s “The Limits of MAGA Art”
Today, there is really no urgency to reflect on Jon McNaughton’s body of work. Adam Lehrer’s recent article in Compact, “The Limits of MAGA Art,'' stakes this out clearly. There is much less danger to endorsing McNaughton in the midst of a failing Biden presidency than there was at the height of anti-Trump hysteria . . . Why address it at all then?
Donald Judd: Crisis of the Aesthetic
In his writings on cultural objects, Adorno self-consciously employed a prismatic and monadological method. The idea was to approach each cultural object as a monad, as a self-contained entity that, if viewed properly, could prismatically illuminate the character of the social totality. This essay seeks to apply a similar method to a work by Donald Judd: Untitled (1967).
Richard Diebenkorn: “Works on Paper” at L.A. Louver
Ken Collins’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, used to promote the recent L.A. Louver show of his works on paper, is peculiar in its emphasis on the distance between the camera and its subject . . .
Simon Dinnerstein and His Wings
“…the triptych painfully reminds us that the form today signifies a broken totality that can only be unified, at best, by an act of artistic creation.”
Hearing in the Present Tense: On La Monte Young's Orphic Revolution
As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics
The Lonely Eye
It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.
Gide’s Looking Glass
Harris Wheless reviews Damion Searls’ new translation of André Gide’s “Marshlands.”
Yesiyu Zhao’s ‘Journey to the West’ at David Castillo Gallery
Suzy V reviews Yesiyu Zhao's show "Journey to the West” at David Castillo Gallery in Miami.
Assembly Required at The Pulitzer
Is interactivity really the same freedom that art is supposed to help us access?
Some Observations on Charles Ray: Figure Ground at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2022)
Charles Ray is unquestionably one of the most powerful and challenging sculptors alive. His recent works presented at the Met carry within them a subtle and expansive understanding of space, a boundless wit and delicacy, and a deep sense of history.
Michael St. John's "The Passions" at De Boer
…the paintings’ true value resides in mediation as a process of transformation: in their voracity, boldness, and tact in transforming the original film stills.
Sofia Gubaidulina: Der Zorn Gottes (2019)
If society no longer reliably yields a consistent aesthetic framework, and if even the immediate sensations of our own minds can no longer be trusted, how can we hope to reach the inner truth of an artwork?
Hysterical Women
maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways.
Louise Lawler “LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK” at Metro Pictures
It took the formula of one species of conceptualism to capture the swan song of another.
John Currin “Memorial” at Gagosian
They’re explicit pictures, and in a world so entirely scrubbed clean of transgression, any sense of naughtiness is its own form of pleasure. Dainty feet and hands poke out in flirty little kicks, one appendage in front of the trompe l'œil frame, the other receding behind. The effect is not unlike a peep show.
“With eyes like ripening fruit”: Manoucher Yektai at Karma
It’s not true that the world is ending — if anything, it already has. And yet life continues, alive in its death. These thoughts — speculations — give a perfunctory account of the work of the late painter and poet Manoucher Yektai, a member of the New York School whose first solo show in the city since 1984 opened at Karma two weeks ago.
Thoughts Had While Watching the Entire Fast & Furious Franchise Against My Will
It was a time of mass shootings, Paris Hilton, boys playing games that looked like war on their consoles and soldiers waging war that looked like video games from drone centers.