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We’re all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave, and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We’re also allowed to change or modify our opinions.
Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren’t necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he’s the biggest, best, or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he’s the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you’re talking about the wonderful, wicked, lovable, and annoying creatures known as art dealers).
Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
Artschwager’s art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you’re looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.
Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art’s version of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I’ve ever seen them before.
I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.
A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, ‘The Clock’ is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself – something almost inhuman.
I don’t know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I’ve gawked at the gaudy prices, and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.