(An Appropriate Distance)

 

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

This year, as always, the College Art Association held a Book & Trade Fair during its annual conference in February – but of course this year it was all different, i.e. everything was virtual.   Convention "goers" simply paid their entrance fees and zoomed into the book-and-trade-fair display at the CAA website on their computers. Companies with products to sell to artists and art historians set up separate "booths" and displayed their wares – or at least (in the case of artists' materials suppliers, like Golden Artist Colors) mainly reminded convention "goers" of their existence. Read More 

Ever since Marcel Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel on a chair, and voiced his famous pronouncement that anything is art if an artist says it is, many (and in recent years, almost all) critics have followed tamely in his wake. So have galleries, museums, auction houses, and collectors – to say nothing of other artists, who in recent years have charmed in-groupers and bemused most of the larger public with every sort of "art" from pickled sharks to shattered antique vases, and from bananas festooned with duct tape to self-destructing pictures. Can the moment possibly have arrived when at least one small but prominent team of critics is willing to say hold, enough? Read More 

Borrowing a title from Ernest Hemingway, I want to call your attention to a most attractive show at the Museum of Modern Art.  As installed in one large, airy, clean, neat and well-lit gallery, it celebrates a group of talented amateurs in "Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946 – 1964" (through September 26).

 Read More 

Like the Morgan, with its David Hockney show, The Metropolitan Museum of Art knows that the surest way to pack in crowds – even in a pandemic – is to give them representational images of "contemporary" people in a "contemporary" style.  Thus we have "Alice Neel: People Come First" within its hallowed halls (through August 1).  When I visited it (on April 8) the line stretched from the elevators nearest Fifth Avenue to Galleries 999, on the west side of the building.  Nor will this be the end of Neel's exposure: the show is scheduled for the Guggenheim Bilbao (September 17 to January 23, 2022) AND the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (March 12, 2022 to July 10, 2022. Michelangelo, eat your heart out! Read More 

"David Smith: Follow My Path" is the name of the latest look at that master sculptor, currently at the East 69th Street branch of Hauser & Wirth (through July 31). Taking its name from a lecture that Smith (1906-1965) gave at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1962, it turns out to be a learning experience for the viewer, much as it must have been for the artist himself. Read More