Criticism and essays on art and culture
Aspen Museum of Art Writers from Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille to Lewis Hyde have contributed to the notion of art as a veiled gift, with strings attached. Generosity and withholding are not antitheses; many of the best artworks are both withholding—in their minimalism, obscurantism, or elusiveness—and, despite their outward reserve, unexpectedly generous. The paintings [ ]
It can be grating to hear people proudly declaring they’ve never heard of an artist, as if ignorance proves that person’s irrelevance. It is especially annoying when – as with Alma Allen, who was announced in November as a surprise pick to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale – it is someone you’ve [ ]
When Donald Judd began buying up property in Marfa, a remote West Texas town in a terrain of grassy high desert strewn with cattle ranches and sudden squat hills, he was looking for a new context for his art. More specifically: He was looking to free himself from the predominant context for art in that [ ]
Early in 2024, graffiti artists broke into the half-finished Oceanwide Plaza skyscraper development in downtown Los Angeles, scaled dozens of flights of stairs and, over a few days, covered much of the towers’ exterior with spray paint. Colorful tags — “Sorak,” “Libre” or “Suave,” more than six feet tall — were emblazoned on mirrored glass windows [ ]
“I don’t consider myself a creative person at all,” Greta Waller tells me, in the kitchen of her south Los Angeles bungalow, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. She’s partway through repainting the cupboard doors of her kitchen with blue and white designs inspired by a large collection of Staffordshire “flow blue” plates mounted on [ ]
On a dance mat in a cavernous rehearsal space in downtown Los Angeles, the actor Abbott Alexander put on a battered green bowler hat, last worn onstage 33 years ago. Nearby, two drummers perched behind their kits and, to the side, two dancers stretched against the wall. Directing the proceedings were Stephen Prina, a conceptual artist and [ ]
The black-and-white photograph shows a wood-panelled room with a pitched roof of dark redwood beams. A low table is pushed cosily up against a large brick hearth, and around it several children sit in easy chairs, one reading, others busily engaged in craft activities. At a piano, a girl strokes a cat, while a dog [ ]
Between 1964 and 1981, visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) could sit in a darkened room and contemplate opalescent wisps of colour drifting slowly across a screen. The installation, tucked in the museum’s basement, was a favourite among regulars. At times, the screen – eight feet wide and six high – was [ ]
I FIRST SAW an artwork by Mike Kelley before I was able to recognize it as such. On the wall of a dorm room at the rural English boarding school I attended, someone had pinned a poster for Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty: a photograph of a stuffed toy crocheted from orange yarn, an alien with [ ]
The high terrain of the Walking Cane Ranch in north-central Arizona, between the Painted Desert and the Little Colorado River and the San Francisco Peaks, is astoundingly beautiful. Flaxen grasses dust black and red volcanic gravel, which rises in huge, soft mounds — extinct volcanoes, the newest of which last erupted in 1066. James Turrell, [ ]