More Culture than Capital: Modesty and Ambition at the Atlanta Biennial
Every year, more cities mount biennials. Over a century of variations on a similar theme, and the purpose of this recurring model remains unclear…
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“What Makes Great Art?” with Jeanne Randolph and Sheila Heti (Episode 8)
What makes “great art”? How do we account for what Gertrude Stein called the “itness” of art, and what are we seeking –…
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Ceramics in the Expanded Field: The Art World, the Clay World, and the Case for John Mason
Let’s suppose that ceramic art, done by artists who were clay handlers before anything else, got accepted as sculpture proper – that and nothing…
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Searching for Lemon Boy
While managing the art collection of the famed theater director Robert Wilson in the early 2000s, Kentucky-born artist Scott Rollins discovered a striking photo of a man wearing a full-body fishnet…
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Can Words “Bounce”? A Complicated Resilience on Vancouver Island
“Words are worldly; not just in the sense that they proliferate and float up into the sky and become cloud-like. Words world too.” Billy-Ray…
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The Seductive Branding of Phoebe Greenberg
Phoebe Greenberg occupies a unique position in Montreal’s art community, as well as in Canada – and she’s made sure of it. The former…
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Feeling the Idea: Jennifer Rose Sciarrino Advances a Speculative Future in Flesh
A strangeness has taken root in Jennifer Rose Sciarrino’s Ruffled Follicles and a Tangled Tongue, at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. It’s a strangeness…
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Ana Mendieta’s Death is Not a Metaphor
Let the art come first. This must have been the axiom behind Covered in Time and History, Martin-Gropius-Bau’s 2018 exhibition of twenty-three films and…
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Sanded Edges: Pierre Huyghe Turns Polite at the Serpentine
Pierre Huyghe’s work has often worn its politics lightly, preferring to focus on the exhibition as a laboratory-theater for cultural experiment. However, his latest…
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“Velvet Buzzsaw” Should Terrify the Artworld
Velvet Buzzsaw, launching on Netflix tomorrow, had me hooked from the first line uttered by its protagonist. In the opening scene, we see Jake Gyllenhaal’s…
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