MY (TOTALLY UN-DAILY) PIC is a delightful item from the April 14, 1914, Washington Post, about two young designers from the Wiener Werkstätte alighting in New York. It goes with my New York Times review of the great show about the Werkstätte’s women that just opened at The Jewish Museum. Those women’s profound recasting of what a woman could be runs rings around the mere rethinking of…
Guy Minnebach, the Sherlock Holmes of Warhol vinyl, has made yet another new discovery : A 1958 cover for Archie Bleyer’s Cadence records, commissioned from Warhol via the ad agency Hockaday Associates, for an album by Colombian pianist Al Escobar and his Afro-Cuban orchestra. To prove it’s by Warhol (he was working in a shared style), Minnebach can cite several known drawings that pretty…
Okay, so I admit that posting the cover of a 1,200-page law book might not seem an obvious fit for a page about art. But as a critic, I’ve gotten a kick dipping into sections like “What Is Art” and “Who Is an Artist,” let alone into copyright cases involving Andy Warhol and Richard Prince that I’ve written about. (I was sad not to see mention of the Metabirkins…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a couple of views from the solo show by Pat Oleszko, at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, New York. She’s also got a big piece in the Whitney Biennial. (Which I’m seeing and reviewing tomorrow, for the Strictly Critical Substack—link in bio.) In the Whitney reviews that I’ve read so far, critics have talked about how great it would be to see her work…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a detail from Jeff Koons’s “Three Graces,” a huge sculpture finished in 2022 and now on view in the show of Koons’s Porcelain Series which, sadly, closes tomorrow at Gagosian in New York. The series just about struck me dumb (as though…) I think it’s the best work Koons has done in decades. It feels like he has taken the sweet little…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a view onto the light table at the heart of “Mammoth,” Nick Cave’s show that opens Friday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I just published a big feature about it in the New York Times, but there was one aspect I didn’t have room to address: By virtue of being filled with craft objects, like the ones favored by Cave’s female relations, the…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is “Elevage de Poussière (Dust Breeding),” a 1964 print of a photo that Man Ray took in 1920 of Marcel Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” after it had sat for years collecting dust in his New York studio. I saw it in the group show called “Ground Work,” at Sean Kelly gallery in New York, that’s very much about materiality — and that made me think about Duchamp’s dust more than his “Glass”.…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is “Cheesehead,” by Lucas Blalock , from his lovely Bureau Gallery twofer with Julia Rommel. It’s hardly news that the pictures you know affect the ones that you don’t, but this was a great demonstration. I’m so used to seeing Blalock’s Photoshop dissections (as in my second image) that I assumed that his shot of foam rubber cheese had to be…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a frame from Andy Warhol’s newly discovered Screen Test of Dennis Hopper. It’s one of 38 rolls of 16mm film that had sat undeveloped in MoMA’s vaults until recently, a story I told in today’s New York Times . (MoMA is screening the rolls on Feb. 2 at 6:30.) In this new Screen Test, Hopper is laughing and blows a kiss. In the weird alternate universe…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is “Physical Optics,” painted in 1975 by the late Alfred Jensen, and now in his solo show at Arne Glimcher’s 125 Newbury gallery in New York. One of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of art involves distinguishing (or refusing to distinguish) between art made by so-called “outsiders,” who might have had goals for their work that…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is “Glass Tears,” a 1933 image from the fabulous Man Ray show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wall text said that the photo was conceived (and used) for an ad for smudge-proof mascara. Other texts explained that the second image at the top of this post, from the pages of the spring 1922 issue of the culture magazine Feuilles Libres, was the first publication of…
THE (UN-)DAILY PIC is a view of the current solo show by Ezra Johnson at Freight + Volume gallery in New York. I’m interested in how Johnson shows the (putative, rhetorical) medium of his art form, stacked in cans in front of the images it produces. It’s as though he’s declaring the definitive made-ness of the paintings, as artifacts, even though they seem to be about the access…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a still from Ragnar Kjartansson’s new video called “Sunday Without Love,” on view for another 10 days at Luhring Augustine gallery in TriBeCa in New York. I reviewed the work in the New York Times, and was kind of happy with what I came up with. So here’s the review: Critic’s Notebook Can the Fine Art World Finally Stomach Sentiment? Paradox is at the…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is an installation called “Faire Foyer” by Sarah Crowner (b. 1974) at the @thebassmoa in Miami Beach. Crowner pairs her own bronzes of enlarged beach pebbles with the Bass’s ceramic mural by Etel Adnan (1925-2021). At the recent art fairs in Miami, I saw a lot of fancy, showy and essentially meaningless abstraction in a mode that I call “Orthodontist…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is Alex Webb’s 1979 photo of “Mexicans arrested while trying to cross the border to the United States. San Ysidro, California,” from The Hazlitt Collection currently on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa. The image could so easily have been taken any day this year—how heartbreaking to think that nothing has really improved in almost 50…
THE (UN)DAILY PIC: Of course there’s a Caravaggio in “In Caravaggio’s Light,” the show of the Roberto Longhi collection that recently arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, FL. But I think the most interesting and even important thing in the show is this painting “of” Saint Bartholomew, along with its four mates that depict other saints (see my…
THE (UN-)DAILY PIC: This image of David with the head of Goliath, painted by the Neapolitan artist Andrea Vaccaro in about 1630, was one of my favorites from “ In Caravaggio’s Light ,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida. It’s a show of gems (and not-so-gems) collected by the late, great Caravaggio scholar Roberto Longhi. In the Vaccaro, I can’t get…
The (un-)Daily Pic: Is a view of some of the pigment-covered stones that helped Anish Kapoor to his first big dose of fame, in the 1980s and ‘90s. I remember seeing them then, and being most entranced by the traces of blue pigment that ended up spread everywhere in the gallery, and beyond, thanks to the hands of over-curious visitors. I loved that interaction with the viewer — a kind of risk…
The (un-)Daily Pic: Some of you (i.e., my parents, siblings, and maybe my six best friends) may have noticed that after almost 2,500 posts, my Daily Pic went awfully quiet in recent years, as I’ve been wrestling with some big projects. Well, it’s time to start it again, if not with the madness of an absolutely daily post. So here’s a photo — an almost-self-portrait, in fact — by…
It’s my pal Andy’s birthday, today … but it’s also the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, as it was on every one of Andy’s birthdays once he turned 17. In 1963, as he perfected his “Death and Disaster” series, he seems to have included today’s image of an atomic explosion. (The date is a guess, since there’s zero documentation of the…