August 6, 2008
Malcolm Mclaren gives Artforum 500 words on the occasion of his portrait series, Shallow:I think our culture today can be summed up by two words: authenticity and karaoke. They can both fit together, but you've got to be a bloody...
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8:42 AM
August 4, 2008
Alright, so last night I made some wisecrack about a scene from Kevin Costner's 1997 film The Postman, where a mutant general pacifies his slave army by showing The Sound of Music on a floating theater on a lake...
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9:59 AM
Spectacular. New York artist Peter Coffin flew a 7-meter, LED-studded, SMS-controlled flying saucer on unannounced trips around the harbor in Gdansk, Poland last month. The lighting and structure were created with London's Cinimod Studio and with the help of...
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Posted by greg at
12:08 AM
August 3, 2008
I loved Cabinet before I wrote for them, and I love them after. In the latest issue, #30 The Underground, Colby Chamberlain looks at an awesome 1971 drawing by Robert Smithson titled, Toward the development of a Cinema Cavern...
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2:15 PM
July 27, 2008
So the geocachers I've relied on to provide the link to the USGS real time data about the elevation of the Great Salt Lake have rejiggered their site. So here's the link I'm using to see if the Spiral Jetty...
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9:22 PM
July 15, 2008
buckminster fuller sculpture at La Guardia Place, originally uploaded by yuko 'n sherlock. The Center for Architecture, Max Protetch and the Buckminster Fuller Institute have teamed up to exhibit two of the original Fly's Eye domes, the last dome...
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Posted by greg at
1:52 AM
July 14, 2008
After seeing it posted here and there, I finally got around to reading the Times article on Rachel Barrett's photo series of NYC newsstands. The documentation & typology field has been well plowed, photography-wise, but I guess Barrett doesn't...
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Posted by greg at
12:22 AM
July 3, 2008
In 1982, the Public Art Fund commissioned Agnes Denes to create Wheatfield - A Confrontation. She planted, cultivated, and harvested two acres of wheat on the vacant landfill that is now Battery Park City. The image above is one...
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9:50 PM
July 2, 2008
So elegiac. The chandeliers with the painted-on camera flares sequence is particularly beautiful. [youtube via artforum video] related: Interesting. Paddy put into a coherent statement what I briefly wondered and then forgot: what's the implication of ArtForum showcasing YouTube...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 AM
June 30, 2008
Gordon Matta-Clark's 1975 film, Day's End, is on view at MoMA right now. It documents a guerrilla project where he and a couple of collaborators cut a giant, moon-shaped hole in the wall of an abandoned sanitation warehouse on...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
June 28, 2008
I'm out of town, so I haven't seen Olafur Eliasson's New York City Waterfalls in person yet. But even though I'm a fan and a friend of the artist, I'm getting a kind of relieved, embarrassed enjoyment reading the...
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Posted by greg at
9:24 AM
June 22, 2008
The scale of the scandal of the management of BYU's art collection was becoming clear just as I entered the art history program there in the late 1980's. For years, the collection had been ignored by everyone except one professor...
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3:05 PM
June 19, 2008
Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly traded outrageous predictions for the future back in 1993. Here's one of Eno's I will definitely be looking forward to:* 2025 AD: A social archaeologist discovers a cowshed built from nineteen old Julian Schnabel paintings.Of...
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3:17 PM
June 17, 2008
Though I find Alexey Titarenko's City of Shadows long-exposure photos of crowds in St. Petersburg a little too melodramatic, Geoff's comment about them struck a chord:But I suppose this is what the world would look like if we could...
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8:01 AM
June 13, 2008
Christie's is calling Andreas Cellarius' Harmonia macrocosmica "PROBABLY THE FINEST CELESTIAL ATLAS EVER PUBLISHED." But then, they would; they have a first edition from 1660 they're hoping will sell for $80-120k next week. Cellarius compiled the celestial maps of...
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Posted by greg at
8:52 PM
June 11, 2008
When I first discovered satelloons a few months ago, I admit, I was a little disappointed to have fallen so hard for the first generation satelloons of Project Echo. This disappointment kicked in when I saw this photo of...
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Posted by greg at
3:39 PM
June 8, 2008
A guard at the Carnegie International defaced a Vija Celmins painting, Night Sky #2, making a "long vertical gouge" with a key. The conservator calls it a "total loss," though the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the 1991...
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Posted by greg at
5:15 PM
June 1, 2008
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up Basel:Ferreira finally teased the name out of the Englishman, who turned out to be Nicholas Logsdail, founder of Lisson Gallery, at which everyone around me seemed to tense up a...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 PM
May 28, 2008
Maybe I shouldn't post about this until I win the auction, but Peter Young's Folded Mandala paintings are spectacular, an entrancing mix of hippie, psychedelic beauty and rigorously visible process. Young left the New York art world behind literally...
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Posted by greg at
7:26 PM
Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was the first to devise a way to visualize the sounds transmitted by solid objects using sand. "He demonstrated the method by sprinkling sand on plates of glass or metal and drawing a bow down...
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Posted by greg at
4:13 PM
May 27, 2008
A scroll back through the recent posts on this site will reveal my fascination with sky surveys, astronomers' attempts to systematically document in photographs the entire sky. The broadest such survey, the Palomar Sky Survey, completed in the 1950's, was...
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10:15 PM
May 22, 2008
Christopher Knight didn't have as bad a time at the performance/filming of Matthew Barney's "REN" as the audience members who were injured by flying glass when the backhoe went at it with the Chrysler Imperial in the auto dealer showroom:When...
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11:31 AM
May 13, 2008
This is awesome, like OG William Kentridge in real space. MUTO is a new stop-action animation by Blu, a Buenos Aires artist, where I guess/hope they have different etiquette about painting over someone else's art on the street. MUTO a...
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Posted by greg at
3:02 PM
May 4, 2008
The Palomar Observatory Sky Survey was sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Over ten years, between 1948 and 1958, astronomers at Cal Tech's Palomar Observatory used a 48-inch Schmidt Telescope to create the most advanced sky survey ever, a comprehensive...
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Posted by greg at
8:53 PM
April 29, 2008
Edward Emerson Barnard was a self-taught astronomer who built a house for himself and his new bride with money earned spotting comets. [A patent medicine magnate was offering $200/comet in the 1880's; in one year, Barnard spotted eight.] He...
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Posted by greg at
12:17 AM
April 26, 2008
Well, he and his studio do. Spatial Vibration documents a series of collaboration/experiments concerning the relationship of sound and space. Several of the experiments are on view in a show of the same name, "Spatial Vibration, String-Based Instrument, Study...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 AM
April 23, 2008
From around 1989-92, the German photographer Thomas Ruff created a body of work using astronomical survey photos from the European Southern Observatory in Chile. There is very little discussion online of this series[1], even though I believe it's the...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 PM
April 19, 2008
In 2005, Robert Gober curated a show at the Menil Collection in Houston. In his catalogue, Robert Gober Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007," for the Schaulager show, Gober says, "Initially, I was only interested in curating from the collection and not...
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1:21 PM
April 14, 2008
Just a Vegas-y two second video, but I wonder if this rain machine gives a hint of what's coming this week at Olafur Eliasson's MoMA/PS1 show....
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Posted by greg at
10:00 PM
April 11, 2008
Another of the things that Richard Serra said at LACMA last week has stuck with me was the artist's call to arms for abstraction: basically, for artists in the 20th century, you're either with us [i.e., Serra and Malevich] or...
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4:18 PM
April 10, 2008
Andy designed this postcard for the Walker Art Center, which is cool. But the notes on the flickr photo are even cooler. cf. the most heavily annotated photo on flickr [kottke]...
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12:01 PM
April 2, 2008
Richard Serra. In the Broad. With a 600-ton steel plate. Serra's always good for a zippy quote, and even though I've heard his and Lynne Cooke's routine before, I figured it'd be worth the trip to hear them speak at...
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Posted by greg at
12:47 AM
March 25, 2008
I don't know, is it a good thing to be rustled awake in the middle of the night by a compulsion to write about an exhibition you saw in December? It's like having a flashback, only to the Elk Grove...
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5:59 AM
March 24, 2008
RC Baker gets all caught up in the spirit in reviewing Zwirner & Wirth's re-creation of Dan Flavin's historic 1964 exhibition at Green Gallery, the first time he exhibited only-flourescent works. The show sounds fascinating, and when combined with Flavin's...
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9:43 AM
March 19, 2008
So after the Whitney opens its downtown branch, it'll sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison? That's the way I read the blueprints being unfurled in the NY Times the last couple of months. Buried in a late December...
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8:46 AM
March 11, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Géode, originally uploaded by zyber. But darned if it isn't pretty damn close. La Géode...
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9:33 AM
March 8, 2008
From "Jeremy Blake in Three Parts," written by editor/curator Bennett Simpson for PS 1's "Greater NY" show. In 2000, Blake's 20-min. digitally animated abstraction titled Angel Dust was in both the harried, hasty "Greater NY" and the Pompidou's "Elysian...
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Posted by greg at
4:10 PM
March 5, 2008
So I'm staring at these Solar Balloons by Coolearth Technology, caught like a deer in some headlights [actually, with this pair, maybe it's "caught like a spring breaker in some headlights, but whatever], and I can't figure them out....
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2:17 PM
February 29, 2008
If anyone's life's work could have at once so little and so much to show for it, it's Agnes Martin. From Brian Droitcour for Artforum:This brisk tour of Agnes Martin’s career—forty years in twenty drawings—is anchored by On a...
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9:35 PM
As he was working on it the last few months, my friend John Powers kept hinting that his upcoming show would have a bit of the Deathstar and a bit of the disintegrating disco ball. He's not kidding. The...
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6:55 PM
February 28, 2008
Holy ^%$&! Man Smuggles Art To The &%#$ing Moon! In 2003, Craig Kalpakjian proposed a series of Earthworks-style drawings that would be executed on the surface of the moon, like the Nazca Lines or 60's bad boys Michael Heizer's and...
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Posted by greg at
12:19 PM
February 27, 2008
After riding the It's a Small World ride half a dozen times on my first trip to Disneyland, I sent off for information on how to become an Imagineer. I was seven. Yet somehow it's taken me until this week...
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11:53 PM
Now I've been a fan of Joep van Lieshout's work for a long time, even if a lot of it's too irreverent or too bombastically oversexualized to evangelize about regularly. ["You see, mom, he builds these room-sized uteruses with built-in...
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Posted by greg at
10:31 PM
February 19, 2008
LACMA director Michael Govan and photographer Terry Richardson--who looks great, by the way, has he had work done?--at the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum last week. Broad and Butter [artforum]...
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5:14 PM
February 16, 2008
Here's a description of the American Pavilion at the Osaka '70 Expo from an online exhibit at Columbia called, "Housing The Spectacle: The Emergence of America's Domed Stadiums":Trying to best R. Buckminister Fuller's Geodesic Dome built for the U.S....
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11:06 AM
February 15, 2008
Of course, I'd only need to recreate The Pepsi Pavilion from Osaka 70 if it didn't exist anymore. Does it? No. As relations between Pepsi and Billy Kluver, the engineer founder of E.A.T., deteriorated over issues of budget and esoteric...
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Posted by greg at
5:38 PM
Let's get one thing out of the way first: I'm a Diet Coke guy. The very fact that The Pepsi Generation existed in 1970 should blow a hole in their brand's supposed youthy credibility big enough to drive a 90-foot...
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Posted by greg at
3:53 PM
February 8, 2008
Now I'm probably biased because we've been longtime fans and collectors of Ruth Root's work, but damned if this isn't the most incredible press release for a gallery exhibition that you will see this year, last year, or next year:...
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12:05 AM
February 4, 2008
純粋階段, originally uploaded by nor1. Atelier Bow Wow is my favorite Japanese architecture firm. Rather than by building or proposing some kind of Roarkian vision, they first made a name for themselves [besides the catchy name they made for...
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Posted by greg at
4:49 PM
Augor Revok msk Originally uploaded by RIBBON CONTROLLER Augur & Revok tagged a Takashi Murakami billboard in December. LA Weekly now reports that Murakami took the billboard down for his own collection. [image via the woostercollective photo pool on...
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Posted by greg at
2:06 PM
February 1, 2008
Score one for the bloggers. In the face of an instant, last-minute, blog-fueled burst of attention, the Utah Department of Oil, Gas & Mines has extended the public comment period until Feb. 13 for Application to Permit Drilling #08-8853,...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 PM
January 28, 2008
At the risk of devolving into an Olafur fanboi site, I'll mention that I was flipping through Take Your Time, the photodocumentary magazine published by the studio in November. Turns out there are multiple shots of the making of...
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6:52 PM
January 26, 2008
He's a tough guy and a really wonderful architect whose work has sent me on more than one pilgrimage in my life. But even so, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Tadao Ando. The most dazzling,...
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2:48 PM
January 23, 2008
From the Great Opening Paragraphs Department, Matthew Placek interviewed NZ documentary filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly for V Magazine:In March of 2006 I traveled with Vanessa Beecroft to Rumbek in South Sudan on two separate occasions to produce an image for...
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Posted by greg at
11:42 AM
January 18, 2008
Choire's got me hooked on the NY Times archives. Here's the headline of an April 2, 1947 review of a MoMA show that contains an early mention of Jackson Pollock:UNUSUAL ART SHOW OPENS AT MUSEUM; Display of Paintings, None Less...
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Posted by greg at
9:46 AM
January 3, 2008
Richter window Originally uploaded by Ralf Stockmann Seriously, the Cologne Cathedral is so on my list of places to visit, once the sunlight returns. I love this photo....
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7:36 AM
December 29, 2007
Yesterday Holland Cotter wrote a glowing review of Triple Candie's current exhibition of the largely white art world's history of misrepresenting the work of Jacob Lawrence. The show consists of full-size reproductions of all 60 panels of Lawrence's masterpiece, The...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 AM
December 27, 2007
Rhonda Lieberman on the opening of Helmut Lang's exhibition, "Next Ever After," at the Journal Gallery in Williamsburg:If a New Yorker cartoon had to sketch a perfectly “hip” awkward situation, they couldn’t have done a better job: a bunch...
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Posted by greg at
10:24 AM
December 26, 2007
Though my reflex was to read David Antin's Artforum review of Lawrence Weiner's Whitney retrospective as a bit of an overshare:...these readings are as slippery as rain and evaporate fairly quickly. Take [a 1962 work] "an object tossed from...
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Posted by greg at
1:05 PM
December 9, 2007
Wow. I can't believe this was shot in 1977. Stations of the Elevated, Manfred Kirchheimer's remarkable documentary--is art documentary a genre?--of New York City's graffiti-saturated trains and their environs is a total throwback feast. The film puts graffiti into...
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Posted by greg at
12:14 AM
November 28, 2007
Buckminster Fuller wha? It was the photo caption in the photo spread of the Foreign Office Architects country house project in the November 2007 World of Interiors on the coffee table. I snapped a quick phonecam photo, thinking I'd look...
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Posted by greg at
1:27 PM
November 21, 2007
As the art market began heating up and becoming much more fashionable a few years ago, I started to wonder what the effect of all this demand would be on the art that was produced. Surely, 95-plus percent of the...
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Posted by greg at
10:42 PM
Alright, the clock is ticking, only hours to go until Jeff Koons' largest work to date, a 53-foot high balloon based on his 1986 sculpture, Rabbit, bobs down the west side in Macy's parade. It was made using a...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 PM
November 15, 2007
I guess when you're a hammer, everything looks like MoMA. It's "Subverting The Dominant Installation" Week at Modern Art Notes, where Tyler is taking inordinate pleasure in shadow boxing with an opponent who retired long ago: Alfred Barr's rickety, linear...
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Posted by greg at
1:13 PM
November 3, 2007
Hello, Olafur Eliasson's studio has a YouTube channel. A couple of months ago, right before the show opened at SFMOMA, he/they posted three videos that show various behind-the-scenes activities from your mobile expectations, the BMW Art Car project. Actually, part...
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Posted by greg at
5:33 PM
October 27, 2007
The Joshua Foer photo timeline, "A Minor History of Giant Spheres," that got me all hopped up on Satelloons, is now online. It's in the latest issue of Cabinet Magazine. And while you should always buy or subscribe to Cabinet,...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 AM
October 23, 2007
Time has a great review of the big JMW Turner exhibition--at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. The Washington Post, meanwhile, has an incomprehensible ramble about the bigger Turner exhibition at the National Gallery. Does Turner's 40+ year-old position...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 PM
October 22, 2007
The Drawing Center has invited me to participate in a "Curator Slam" this Friday to celebrate the launch of their new Online Viewing Program. One of the Center's greatest strengths has been its slide registry, which enabled artists who hadn't...
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Posted by greg at
11:57 PM
I'm still looking around for anyone who gave an account of yesterday's discussion of Warhol films at the American Museum of the Moving Image. Warhol Film Project director Callie Angell and film critic Amy Taubin were supposed to "discuss the...
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Posted by greg at
11:38 PM
October 16, 2007
It looks like the RISD Mall Dwellers have some stiff, French competition. Via UX frontman and UnterGunther spokesman Lazar Kunstmann comes this most excellent photo of the crates the guerilla restorers used to camouflage their workshop in the Pantheon,...
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Posted by greg at
11:27 PM
October 9, 2007
l: Pantheon r: Pantheon w/Ernesto Neto's 2006 installation, Leviathan Thot Wow, worlds collide, I feel like I'm in an Umberto Eco novel. At nights over the course of a year, a group of urban explorers in Paris who call...
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Posted by greg at
3:41 PM
October 8, 2007
Yes, I do have a ton of other things I should be doing, but I can't seem to get Project Echo out of my head. I really want to see this, 100+ foot spherical satellite balloon, "the most beautiful...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
October 7, 2007
image: NASM From about 1956 until 1964, US aeronautics engineers and rocket scientists at the Langley Research Center developed a series of spherical satellite balloons called, awesomely enough, satelloons. Dubbed Project Echo, the 100-foot diameter aluminumized balloons were one...
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Posted by greg at
11:00 AM
October 3, 2007
tape portrait of FDNY B.C. Dennis Devlin 23rd St, north side, between Park & Lex Wow. Before he became known as Apartment In The Mall Guy, artist Michael Townsend was Tape Art Guy. Over the course of five years,...
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Posted by greg at
3:13 PM
October 2, 2007
"Dude, you totally missed out on the shadow boxes from the Pottery Barn." Spectacular. It's the suburban corollary to the urban explorer-style underground cinematheque of La Mexicaine des Perforation: surreptitiously creating and programming space in that most sprawling of American...
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Posted by greg at
10:45 PM
September 29, 2007
Dara Friedman is unobtrusively videotaping people singing show tunes in public in New York City for a project commissioned by the Public Art Fund:The policeman on the staircase barely looks up; the two little girls beside him continue giggling about...
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Posted by greg at
4:50 PM
September 27, 2007
A support campaign for the marching monks of Burma, including this stencil, which is downloadable as a pdf [saffronrevolutionworldwide.blogspot.com via monoscope]...
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Posted by greg at
10:26 PM
September 22, 2007
I've been listening to WNYC's anniversary tribute programming for John Cage, and it's really great [if a bit over-narrated; I mean, who's going to listen to 24h33m of John Cage programming on-demand who isn't at least somewhat familiar with...
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Posted by greg at
11:44 PM
Randy Kennedy has a great, if slightly artificially naive, article on Richard Prince, whose retrospective opens at the Guggenheim next week. Despite curator Nancy Spector's play-along comments to the contrary, Prince's "readymade" edition of three custom-built replicas of a...
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Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
September 16, 2007
Have Mexican artists ever met an obelisk they didn't want to make portable and drive to New York? Obelisco Transportable, 2004, Damian Ortega, on view with the Public Art Fund, thru 10/28 [image: Ortega's gallery, kurimanzutto]: Portable Broken Obelisk (for...
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Posted by greg at
8:14 AM
September 15, 2007
still from Inner and Outer Space, 1965 Fascinating. In 1965, months before pioneering video artist Nam Jun Paik got his hands on his own first video camera, Norelco loaned Andy Warhol its new, $3,950 slant scan video recording system for...
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Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
September 14, 2007
Wait, the Warhol Museum called the 1-hour excerpt of Empire released on DVD an unauthorized bootleg? Yes they did, in 2004:“It’s a bootleg!” says Geralyn Huxley, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.Which is odd. The Italian...
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Posted by greg at
6:28 PM
September 13, 2007
The Internet is a series of tubes. Also, the art world is a series of dinner parties. My favorite out-of-nowhere aphorism: "Forget about one-on-one art. This fall, elitism will find its feet in a rush of exclusive, invitation-only performances, like...
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Posted by greg at
1:22 PM
September 8, 2007
I continue to be baffled by the breathlessly uninformed reportage of the supposed sale of Damien Hirst's diamond-and-platinum skull. From the very first news report of the sale in the Evening Standard journalists have gotten it wrong, and everyone else...
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Posted by greg at
1:48 AM
September 4, 2007
Ugh, Lee Rosenbaum's op-ed in the LA Times is so wrong in so many ways, even Tyler Green can't keep track of them all. She opines on the looming crisis facing museums ["Public collecting is endangered"!] who can't buy...
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Posted by greg at
1:33 PM
August 29, 2007
Is John Wilmerding the Karl Rove of the American Art world? In May 2005, Alice Walton effectively broke ground on her Bentonville, Ark. museum project Crystal Bridges, by buying Asher Durand's 1849 painting Kindred Spirits from the New York...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 AM
August 28, 2007
When I saw images of front architecture's billboard-shaped house-on-a-pole floating about, the first thing I thought of was one of the first sculptures by Michael Ashkin I ever saw. It's title, "For Months He Lived Between The Billboards," pretty...
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Posted by greg at
4:21 PM
August 26, 2007
Gerhard Richter's design for the stained glass window in the Köln Cathedral was unveiled yesterday. 11,500 handblown glass squares in 72 colors. German: das Gerhard Richter Fenster in Köln English: Gerhard Richter window in Cologne, hires image [washjeff.edu via boingboing]...
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Posted by greg at
8:32 PM
August 21, 2007
This is what I get for not going to the Serpentine Summer Party this year...Publisher of a new magazine that melds artistic and architectural experimentation, Eliasson is currently involved in numerous architectural projects such as the Icelandic National Concert...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
At a recent conference talk on magic given in Las Vegas, Teller [the quiet one] gave the most amazing definition of magic I wish I'd heard before writing about Scott Sforza for Cabinet Magazine's magic issue:[Magic is] the theatrical linking...
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Posted by greg at
6:43 PM
August 8, 2007
In 1810, the last year of his young life, painter Philipp Otto Runge devised his Color Sphere, one of the first attempts to depict a comprehensive color system in three dimensions. Runge was a correspondent of Goethe, who was...
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Posted by greg at
12:16 AM
August 4, 2007
The Japanese magazine Art-iT asked ten artists, directors, curators and i-don't-knows for their top ten "'artistic' films of the 21st century". I was glad but just a little surprised to see Jeremy Blake's Sodium Fox, which I don't think was...
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Posted by greg at
5:23 PM
July 31, 2007
In less than thirty seconds, I could rattle off a dozen people in the real estate business, and another easy dozen in the video and film business, and a dozen in the finance business, who have incredibly, admirably, even enviably...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
July 26, 2007
Quadriceptica II is an amazing exhibition of which the Cultural Directorate of Rjamusz can be justly proud, and to which anyone seriously interested in pan-national trends in current post-market cultural production must direct themselves before the onset of locust season....
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Posted by greg at
9:47 AM
July 25, 2007
Alright, I will grant that a 54-carat, flawless pink diamond would push the fabrication cost of an 1,100-carat pave' and platinum skull beyond the $3-4 million I was able to account for. Still, it's worth noting that the whisper...
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Posted by greg at
7:26 PM
July 22, 2007
Good to see he's taking a brave stand against the one museum that isn't contemplating opening an annex on the west side of Manhattan, though. You stay strong, Mitt. [image and scoop: tmz.com, story and aide's inane excuse for...
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Posted by greg at
7:38 AM
July 20, 2007
From Theresa's blog, The Wit of the Staircase:From the French phrase 'esprit d'escalier,' literally, it means 'the wit of the staircase', and usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended. "Esprit...
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Posted by greg at
1:03 PM
July 19, 2007
Can I just say, I've reached a point in my life where I don't know what's left to accomplish? I mean, how can I top the thrill of getting to write for Cabinet Magazine? I just don't know. I've had...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
July 12, 2007
There's only a partial list of artists included, but the premise of this show holds a lot of promise. Though I would hope that assimilation has more to do with exploration and manipulation, not just funny camera angles:Since photography’s inception,...
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Posted by greg at
2:51 PM
June 29, 2007
There's an excellent, loong interview on Archinect with Kenneth Goldsmith, the artist, poet, dj, theory karaokeist [?], professor, and web developer behind the incomparable UbuWeb. Ubu began with just texts, and as collections and formats and partners came their way,...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
June 26, 2007
So if you're going to see the Richard Serra exhibition at MoMA--and you should, it's really quite spectacular--you should see it when the museum is closed, because then you have the whole place to yourself. A friend John and...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
June 23, 2007
Holy smokes. Artforum reports that chef Ferran Adrià is participating in this year's Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, by leaving a table for two open at El Bulli every night for exhibition visitors. El Bulli is in Costa Brava,...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
June 7, 2007
It's actually happening. Ever since it was first announced that Felix Gonzalez-Torres would be the artist representing the US at the Venice Biennale, I've kind of held my breath to see if it would actually come off. And it...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 PM
June 5, 2007
First things first: if someone DOES buy Damien Hirst's diamond-and-platinum skull, it won't be for $100 million. Any shlub billionaire walking in off the street would get 10% off, and any actual collector would get 20%. So if someone's...
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Posted by greg at
12:33 PM
June 1, 2007
When I heard that Christopher DeLaurenti used body mics and a mini-disc-equipped vest to make his surreptitious recordings of orchestral intermissions, I was like, "Half the recording is probably the squeaks of his leather vest. What he's actually capturing isn't...
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Posted by greg at
6:14 PM
May 25, 2007
Look, wasn't born in time for this "Human Be-In" of which the Grey-haired Ones speak, but I own shagpad.com, so don't think I'm not down with the groovy, psychedelic 60's. But if going to the Whitney triggered a flashback...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
May 19, 2007
As part of Rotterdam 2007 - City of Architecture, the city commemorated the 15-minute-long German bombing on May 14, 1940 that destroyed the city center, precipitated the Dutch surrender in WWII--and ultimately provided the occasion for all that new...
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Posted by greg at
11:11 AM
May 16, 2007
Raimundas Malasauskas: Can we ask him who he was in his past life? David Magnus: There might be a surprise, but he was an athlete, a preacher. He had something to do with the Mormons. I don't know what, I...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
May 8, 2007
I have no idea what to make of this. Dresden painter Eberhard Havekost's Kontakt is coming up for auction at Phillips de Pury on May 17th. Its oblique, cropped composition depicts the flat, linear patterns of the facades of the...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 AM
May 6, 2007
Seriously, where do they find this stuff? In the 25th issue of the inimitable Cabinet Magazine, Jeffrey Kastner has a few tasty excerpts from The Museum of Modern Art Artists' Cookbook, by Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk, published in 1977....
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Posted by greg at
10:07 PM
May 3, 2007
We finally made it to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last weekend. I'll see a Sheeler show any time, any place, but except for a nice population of Diebenkorns and the well-stocked Oceanic galleries--oh, and Gerhard Richter's disorienting photomural...
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Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
April 17, 2007
Richard Neutra's office building in Silver Lake is for sale. It's about 4900sf, plus two apartments in back, with some Neutra built-ins and fixtures. No price is mentioned, but the broker does helpfully provide a ceiling:RECENT SALES OF IMPORTANT...
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Posted by greg at
8:40 PM
April 11, 2007
And by 'out there,' I mean in North Korea. And by 'a Cremaster,' I mean Cremaster 1, Barney's foray into Busby Berkley stadium spectacle. NK's Arirang Festival has choreographed logistics to make even Barbara Gladstone blush [well, maybe]: 100,000...
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Posted by greg at
9:06 AM
April 9, 2007
My favorite line in the Daily Utah Chronicle interview with Paul Morrissey, where he admits Andy Warhol sent a double, actor Allen Midgette, to a lecture at the University of Utah, is from Kay Israel, assistant editor campus paper:Mr. Morrissey:...On...
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Posted by greg at
8:50 AM
April 7, 2007
Staffers in the University of Utah Art Department raised suspicions that night that the man who'd just presented on campus was not, in fact, Andy Warhol, but an impersonator. As a result, event organizers withheld the $1,000 speaking fee while...
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Posted by greg at
12:06 PM
April 6, 2007
So this week I gave a lecture about how collectors and the market get weird with art at the University of Utah. It was a lot of fun for me, and it seemed to go over alright. I took as...
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Posted by greg at
7:36 PM
April 1, 2007
We had a four-hour layover at O'Hare yesterday, which was long enough to become thoroughly disgusted with CNN's non-stop toggling between three major crises: what if that dude with the hair wins American Idol? the daily truck bombings in Iraq,...
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Posted by greg at
10:55 AM
March 30, 2007
"Spiral Doily" postcard, Corinne, UT, 2005 Yow, didn't realize how radio silent it's been around here. I've been working on a couple of deadlines, one article I'll go into later, and a lecture I'm just tightening up right now....
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Posted by greg at
10:31 PM
March 13, 2007
It had sparked one of those jump-the-shark anxiety attacks when I heard that one of the artists I most admire, Olafur Eliasson, had been commissioned to do an Art Car for BMW. Even as it included such respected artists...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 PM
February 26, 2007
So the Oscars. Did I just miss their press release warning that they were going to inject off-off-Broadway wacky juice into the show? Because after being numbed into catatonia by years of Debbie Allen, Debbie Allen manques, and Gil Coates'...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 AM
February 23, 2007
Paddy Johnson at ArtFagCity manages to capture the Armory Show and the entire art fair phenomenon in two sentences: "It's hard to know what to think of anything. Everything looks like you should buy it." The Armory Show: New Digs,...
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Posted by greg at
8:52 PM
So Christie's bought Haunch of Venison, which will open an outpost in Rockefeller Center, the spectacular, near-raw space where the Judd Foundation pieces were previewed? Great. But is it, as the NYT calls it, "the first time, an auction house...
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Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
February 18, 2007
WPS1 has posted the audio for MoMA's recent symposium, "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." Listening to a panel discussion with no access to the visuals can be a tough sell, but the two talks...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
February 6, 2007
The idea to use a large heliostat to deliver winter sunlight to a small village deep in a valley of the Italian Alps, was a success: The mirror — 870 meters, or 2,900 feet, above Viganella and measuring 8 meters...
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Posted by greg at
9:26 AM
February 2, 2007
I was beginning to think everyone in Boston, and most everyone in the media, and most certainly everyone in the cable news industry, was a freakin' idiot. [cf. nearly every angry, belligerent comment by an embarassed official; the smartass...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
January 30, 2007
The constroversy over Peter Baxter's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from Slamdance's Guerilla Gamemakers Festival hit the New York Times this weekend, and Baxter has yet another explanation for his actions. This time, it's not complaints by a...
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Posted by greg at
10:40 AM
January 25, 2007
Marcos Vilarino has recreated some early landmarks of modern photography in Lego, including this interpretation of Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Feininger's "The Photojournalist" {note: it's Andreas, not Lionel/Lyonel, who was a painter] and the world's first photo, Niepce's view out his window...
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Posted by greg at
12:59 PM
January 11, 2007
There are very few artists I'd like to see a documentary about. For one thing, the narrative arc of a movie is usually ill-suited to either an artist's story/ideas or to the experience of the work itself. And no one...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 AM
Awesome. Just. Awesome. A couple who lives in the Rockefeller Apartments across 54th St from MoMA was watching the museum test the projections for the their upcoming Doug Aitken installation. Your Video Art Here [flickr via curbed] One of...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
January 9, 2007
For the 2006 Turner Prize exhibition, artist Phil Collins had Tate Britain set him up with an office in the gallery, where he and two hired researchers worked every day on Phil's next project: "finding people who feel their lives...
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Posted by greg at
10:29 PM
January 8, 2007
With six trans-oceanic flights last month, I ended up seeing The DaVinci Code with the sound off at least two dozen times. The only thing that surprises me about this Reuters story is that it's taken this long for other...
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Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
January 3, 2007
Arne Quinze has a posse. The Belgian self-marketer began his cross-country promotional tour for the launch of the new Lexus flagship at Burning Man. Though he didn't really mention the tie-in to anyone there at the time, he sure has...
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Posted by greg at
2:52 PM
December 20, 2006
I used to live downstairs from Nam June Paik. I was too starstruck to ever talk with him at length, but we had friendly chats when we'd see each other in the stairway of our Little Italy loft building....
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Posted by greg at
3:17 PM
December 13, 2006
The funniest line so far from coverage of Miami Basel. It's from New York Mag's "Basel Blog," which reports that collectors have moved to buying work by safe artists from established galleries. Which is probably what it looks like if...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 PM
Sara and Marc are so awesome. The global street art blowout at 11 Spring Street organized by Wooster Collective opens tomorrow, and it runs through Sunday, 11-5 each day. Artists from all over, including some who installed their work on...
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Posted by greg at
7:43 PM
Sorry, I was out of town. Did anything happen art-wise while I was gone? On the film/editing front, the votes were in, and I'm pleased to announce a new addition to the greg.org team: a husky MacBookPro and a couple...
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Posted by greg at
7:31 PM
November 30, 2006
Roll up a host of moribund art magazines. Start an art news portal. Launch a big, glogsy new magazine about the [sic] Biennale Lifestyle. Buy an art fair. It hurts to say it because I have friends there, but am...
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Posted by greg at
4:14 PM
November 25, 2006
It's what I've always said Art Basel Miami Beach needed more of: blimps. And now they've got'em. It's almost enough to make me wish I wasn't going to be in Kyoto. A beachside Blimp Parade with characters from artists I...
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Posted by greg at
9:47 PM
November 21, 2006
The FBI said Monday that it has recovered a 1778 painting by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya that was stolen as it was being taken to an exhibition earlier this month. "Children with a Cart," which disappeared en route...
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Posted by greg at
12:09 AM
November 13, 2006
Maurizio Cattelan's Not afraid of love, 2000, shown at Marian Goodman. [via artnet] and Mr. Snuffalupagus in storage on the set of Sesame Street [via flickr]...
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Posted by greg at
2:14 PM
November 8, 2006
Today, this is just one more picture of a well-balanced bastard. Twenty years from now, though, this dude's family will sell this photo to the Guggenheim: Well Balanced Bastards of The Day [dethroner.com] The photo's from Hans Kemp's book, Bikes...
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Posted by greg at
6:03 PM
November 7, 2006
Wow. The sale of one of the paintings I wrote about in the NYT the other day, a blue-period Picasso portrait being sold by Andrew Lloyd Webber,was recently ordered stopped by a Manhattan court. An heir to Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,...
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Posted by greg at
5:13 PM
November 4, 2006
That was my original choice for a title, but I'm happy enough just not botching the Hamlet reference. Thanks to all the people who helped with interviews and research and editing. Since the story closed, I've heard from a couple...
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Posted by greg at
11:37 PM
November 3, 2006
They're doing construction in DC, and the workers dumped a found-art version of a Richard Serra/Robert Smithson installation in front of our house....
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Posted by greg at
4:31 PM
October 24, 2006
Damn, I just hate when that happens. I hate when some sick poseur geezer company who makes SUV's for orthodontists or whatever totally rips off and corrupts the free, utopian, non-commercial, creative spirit of youth--of the future, even. As...
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Posted by greg at
1:39 PM
October 22, 2006
Bronx, NY, 2004, Funeral service for Sgt. Luis Moreno Paul Fusco began photographing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq in 2004 as a "personal protest against government attempts to downplay the costs of war." It's not the...
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Posted by greg at
9:06 PM
October 11, 2006
We're beyond Machinima, people. Some titles have photography as part of the gameplay, and some players are tweaking the games themselves to take in-game photographs. The results are finding their way onto flickr, like Gregory Perez's homage [top] to...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 PM
October 9, 2006
Curator Nancy Spector described Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque, which the Guggenheim acquired in 1999 from the artist's estate [controlled by his widow Nancy Holt and represented by James Cohan Gallery] this way:Hotel Palenque perfectly embodies the artist’s notion of...
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Posted by greg at
4:45 PM
October 4, 2006
Like Pompeii in reverse, Gibellina has been remembered by its ghost-like burial instead of an unearthing. In 1968, an earthquake devastated villages throughout the Belice Valley of western Sicily. The Italian government's incompetent response to the disaster and the...
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Posted by greg at
12:38 AM
October 3, 2006
As has been reported before, Ms. Sydney McGee, an 28-year veteran art teacher in a Texas elementary school has been suspended after a parent complained that his/her child saw nude art during a field trip to the Dallas Museum of...
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Posted by greg at
9:18 PM
September 30, 2006
Carol Vogel has a story about Damien Hirst's restoration replacement of the shark [yes, that shark]: Such is his reputation that when a seven-foot shark washed up on a beach in July, and the Natural History Museum in London needed...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 PM
September 28, 2006
"In terms of the way the art world functions today, 'Scene & Herd' is the new October." Francesco Vezzoli is also working on a documentary funded by Miuccia Prada. Scene & Herd: Burden of History [artforum]...
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Posted by greg at
3:58 PM
September 27, 2006
I guess if Kaikai Kiki had wanted the name of its biannual Toyko otaku art fair, Geisai, spelled properly, they should've upgraded Walter Robinson's seat for him. Instead, as he wrote, he had to use his own frequent flier...
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Posted by greg at
12:59 AM
September 25, 2006
Now, after reading Regine's writeup of Marc and Sara's Wooster Collective presentation on street art, I'm double mad I missed Conflux this year. previously V-2's Adam Greenfield on taking Urbanist icons to the woodshed...
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Posted by greg at
11:45 PM
John Currin's list, for example, reads like his kid's birthday party gift registry. And while I'm tempted to buy Helmut Lang that $5 John Chamberlain wall relief catalogue, I have to wonder why it's on there at all. Did he...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 AM
September 19, 2006
The Venice Biennale of Architecture may have been a critical bust--both the Times' and the Guardian's people panned it, complaining that it's a book in exhibition format, or text and videos but no architecture--but I have to say, it...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 PM
September 16, 2006
I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, "Hey, what's been going on with Greg and the Belgian Waffle?" No? Too bad. Cuz I'll tell you. The Burning Man curator known as LadyBee and I have been going...
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Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
September 4, 2006
The last mention of Lee Siegel on this blog was also the first. Since about three hours after he published that dumbass comment about Twombly, I've basically taken pains not to read his criticism. Life was just too short. And...
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Posted by greg at
12:48 PM
September 3, 2006
It took over 600 years to complete [from 1248 t- 1880], so it should surprise absolutely no one that it takes the Cologne Cathedral [or Kölner Dom] over 60 years to fix a broken window. Gerhard Richter has been...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
August 30, 2006
Six years drinking at the open bar of power is enough to get anyone a little woozy, so it should be no surprise that the shots fired at MoMA from the right by two pundits from the American Enterprise Institute...
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Posted by greg at
4:43 PM
August 16, 2006
For a couple of months now, I've been really pre-occupied by this discussion of the color white and its association with modernism. It's between Olafur Eliasson, curator Daniel Birnbaum, and Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia's architecture school and...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 AM
August 2, 2006
This: The Tangled Web of Syriana by Philip Dhingra [philosophistry.com via mathowie] reminds me of this: from Mark Lombardi: Global Networks, Nov. 1 - Dec. 18, 2003 [drawingcenter.org] in a good way....
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Posted by greg at
8:43 PM
Much like the 24-hour interview-a-thon itself, Claire Bishop's report from the Serpentine Pavilion starts out hilariously--my original title for this post was to be "LOLOLOL"--and ends with unexpected substance and insight. Whether her declaration is the first, I don't care,...
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Posted by greg at
6:06 PM
July 25, 2006
Here's the schedule for this Friday's 24-hour interviewathon at the Serpentine Gallery pavilion. Mega-interviewer Hans Ulrich Obrist and perennial interviewee Rem Koolhaas will be tag-teaming on a whole slate of "culture industry" types. If you can't imagine ending your night--or...
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