Amy Sillman
Genre-defying, but far from vague
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Author Archive
Post-Boredom
Matthew Barney isn't transgressive. He's a fraud.
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Titian in Britain: A great 16th-century painter finds new fans in London.
There can be such a thing as too much history. One encounters it in cities like Venice and Paris, where the boulevards and the canals have ceased carrying significant cultural traffic to ferry around sclerotic hordes of tourists instead. Even London, a bustling town that wears its newfound relevance as a financial and cultural center
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William Bailey: A collection of work by the American art scene’s sole authoritative father figure.
Over the years, William Bailey has been called lots of things, including "one of the most accomplished painters of his day" and "one of the best" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New Criterion. Robert Hughes, the unchallenged, if senescent, titan of American criticism, once singled out his encyclopedic history, American
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Bring in the Neue: A Godsend Arrives on Museum Mile
Every population of every major metropolis tends to think of its own dark time as 100 percent unique. New York is no different. As the century slowly advances into double-digit infancy and the millennial fog lifts from collective view, odds are that the next 97 years could, with a triple dose of luck, patience and
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Hélio Oiticica at the New Museum
Hélio Oiticica Oiticica, the subject of a recent exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, is that spiniest of art subjects: a dead artist with a genuinely outlandish legacy, and a poster boy for 21st-century curatorial globalism, art’s latest institutional orthodoxy. It’s easy to dismiss him for the posthumous company he keeps; to love
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Frida Kahlo, et al., at El Museo del Barrio
There are at least three versions of the first encounter between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. In the one Kahlo biographers refer to most, Kahlo and Rivera met at a party at the home of the photographer Tina Modotti. Displeased with the music and eager to call attention to himself, Rivera drew a pistol and
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MoMA QNS
The Museum of Modern Art first opened its doors in 1929 with a loan exhibition of four artists whose works dated from the 1880s: Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat. Starting with that show, the museum’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., proposed a forward-looking metaphor for keeping MOMA’s artistic mission
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“New York: Capital of Photography”
A week after Sept. 11, I received an invitation to lecture for two weeks in a distant South American capital. Despite the guilt I felt at leaving my wife, friends and other New Yorkers dealing with the trauma of the event, I sensed a large weight slipping off my shoulders the moment the airplane left
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Merlin James
Documenta, Manifesta, the long roster of international biennials that includes Venice, Sao Paulo, Havana, Kwangjo, Istanbul and the Whitney: separately and together, these multimillion-dollar theme-park art extravaganzas promote globalism’s view of world visual culture. Their organizers, an interchangeable cast of art functionaries, espouse an eclectic mix of applied entrepeneurship and anti-esthetic post-structuralism, a political and
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