With Sharper Tools: Defending the National Endowment for the Arts
The Heritage Foundation and conservative groups like it have been trying to kill the National Endowment for the Arts for decades. Last month, the Trump…
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Love and Loneliness: Queering Modernisms in Figurative Painting
I work on 22nd Street in the Chelsea gallery district of Manhattan, so it was easy to notice the painting. Louis Fratino’s I keep…
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“I’m Staying Away From Trump as Subject Matter”: Howardena Pindell On Refusal and Evolution
The American artist Howardena Pindell arrived in London for her first solo show in the UK just as the 45th US President landed for…
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Are We Being Preached To? Adrian Piper’s Prompts at the MoMA
Adrian Piper’s artistic statements reject a moralizing approach. “I try for simplicity, not simplification. I don’t want to make prescriptions about what people should…
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Interrupting Business as Usual: A Close Reading of MoMA’s Muslim Ban Intervention
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently rehung its prized Modern galleries, swapping out works by greats like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso for…
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Isa Genzken Plays with the Artworld’s Insides in “I Love Michael Asher”
“And why is this dedicated to Michael Jackson?” journalist Randy Kennedy asked Isa Genzken last February as both sat on a stage at the…
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The Renewed Focus and Acrid Targeting of Rachel Harrison at MoMA and Greene Naftali
Rachel Harrison’s acidic colors, faux-finish surfaces, and otherwise unseemly media screech like saboteurs of good taste. Unlike a certain nascent presidential candidate, however, they…
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Wresting the Work of Straub and Huillet from the Annals of Academia and Art History
How much homework should we expect to slog through, en route to art? One could surmise “A lot,” according to Jean Marie Straub and…
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Emerging Artist Neil Beloufa Turns Smug at MoMA
As subject matter, the debased utopia is low-hanging fruit. Every continent has a few, and they emanate intoxicating aromas of corrupted idealism. In making…
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Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?
On my end-of-the-year “Best Shows” list, I nominated Rachel Rose’s hypnotic Everything and More video at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In response,…
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