Jason presents his contrarian contention that Yoko Ono is of greater importance than John Lennon. I’ll just say I think he highly underestimates the value of popular culture, whether it takes a commodity form or not. Besides, the artistic field in the 1960s only made sense as an engagement with popular forms previously outside the […]
I’d like to give notice of (and congratulate) a couple of college friends of mine, Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, for their upcoming exhibition at Harvard’s Carpenter Center. When I asked, they didn’t tell me what exactly the installation would be, but I saw Wade’s work in the Whitney biennial a couple years back and […]
In our bookclub discussion of photography last night, the question came up of why for a reproducible art form, photographs still command high prices for canonical or critical-favorite works. Why do we pay $408,000 for an "original" Arbus? One explanation was that it was a conspiracy among galleries to trick people into paying a lot […]
I’m not sure exactly what Jay’s gripe is, other than blasting the sin of having unclear academic writing style in a newspaper, but the point of the Times review of the Fogg/Sackler Museum’s new Frank Stella exhibit doesn’t seem to me all that obscure: Stella’s minimalist "Black paintings" were seen as a sensation when they […]
I have to admit, when I first saw that the MFA was going to have an exhibit titled Degas to Picasso: Modern Masters, I remembered Dorothy Parker’s old line about running the gamut from A to B.
- JL, Modern Kicks.
I’d probably share Jason’s lament that the public sculpture Partisans has been removed from Boston Common only, embarrassingly enough, I somehow have never even noticed it before. I would disagree, however, with his populist characterization of the cultural battle at hand:
It’s not the last time someone will hear "they didn’t fit" coming from a resident […]
I’m confused. I understand that "in the late 1980s and early 1990s, [a political wave] encompassed artists’ response to the AIDS crisis and what became known as ‘‘identity art,’’ which plumbed multiculturalism." But has the art world undergone such a formalist and conceptual turn that it makes sense to speak of art "reengaging with social […]
Open Studios were this weekend in Jamaica Plain. I have to admit it’s the first year I’ve done them there, and it’s a fun thing to wander around the neighborhood looking at art and people’s studios, particuarly given the good weather. As I predicted, a good 90 percent of the work was either sub-par or […]
I’m wondering why the Keno brothers and the folks at Find!, who should know better, confuse historical preservation with historical restoration. One only has to tour a house that’s been preserved - maintained without trying to recreate what furnishings, wallpaper, etc. would have looked like when new - to appreciate that neither preservation nor restoration […]
In lighter news, I know it’s not very big of me, but when I read stuff like this, I just want them to fail, fail, fail.
The Globe has a guest op-ed on the New Corporate MFA. The author, president of the security union at the museum, has a bone to pick, but he’s right. […]
In face of news of the stolen Edvard Munch reproductions, Brad Plumer wonders why one should even care about the authenticity of art when forgeries and copies can pass themselves off to the casual observer. Presumably, that doesn’t apply to the Munch copy, which was a photograph, which is just not the same as a […]
From the Globe today:
The issue is an Elizabeth Montgomery statue unveiled in Salem. I’m excited to see an anti-kitsch new social movement spring up, but who would have thought?
After pointing me to James Howard Kunstler’s article on oil depletion, my friend Whit looked up Kunstler’s website and suggested I take a look. He’s right: it’s a series of a serious thesis and some smart readings of buildings punctuated with rants: one confusing postmodern architecture with a strawman cultural relativism, one mocking factory workers […]
Last night, my friends and I went out for post-dinner birthday drinks at one of those bistro-y South End bars and in the process discovered an insidious trend. Reaching for the wine list lying next to the bar menu, we discovered that it was in fact a list, with prices, of all of the art […]
A couple of weeks back, the Bostonist made an off-hand remark about the dreadfulness of the Irish Potato Famine Monument located in front of the Washington St. Borders. I have to second that indeed, it’s the worst public sculpture in Boston. It puzzles me why tourists crowd around to take pictures of such an ugly […]