Author Archive

Sue Williams at 303 Gallery

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

A wonderful thing happened on the way to the millennium. Painting, after years of taking a beating at the hands of art Jacobins and assorted ideologues, returned with renewed gusto to the challenge of representing the times. Saying hello to new developments like the computer and goodbye to old schisms like that between representation and
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“Mirroring Evil”: It’s Only Nazis

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

One sure sign that things have returned to normal after Sept. 11 is the newest, distressingly repetitive installment of the culture wars being played out over yet another "scandalous" art show. In the fractious vein of "The Perfect Moment," Robert Mapplethorpe’s raunchy 1989 retrospective, the Brooklyn Museum’s "Sensation" and Hans Haacke’s Republican-bashing installation at the
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The Elusive Barnes Foundation

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

On a four-lane road called City Ave., about 20 minutes outside Philadelphia, past a Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits and an undistinguished strip mall, a discreet blue sign provides the only clue to the whereabouts of one of the world’s greatest private art collections, amassed with bloody singlemindedness by a pharmaceutical magnate named Albert C. Barnes
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The Gorgeous, Kaleidoscopic Works of Consummate American Artist Lane Twitchell Are on View at Midtown’s Artemis Greenberg Van Doren

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Some artists see things big and others see things small. Lane Twitchell, whose beautiful kaleidoscopic works are now on view at 57th St.’s Artemis Greenberg Van Doren, does both. Combining big-picture historical narratives and a romantic, esoteric search for his own personal cosmology, Twitchell hoards symbols like a magpie, building wild constructions of paper, color
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19 Pioneering Visual Artists Step “Into the Light” at the Whitney

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

"I am a camera with its shutter wide open, quite passive, recording, not thinking," Christopher Isherwood wrote in the opening lines of the Berlin Stories. Penned in 1930, Isherwood’s dispassionate description of himself reflected the then common view of the photographic camera as the ultimate objective observer, while suggesting, in the words of contemporary video
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Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim, for the Shallow and Jug-Stupid

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

In 1949, the writer Russell Lynes suggested in the pages of Harper’s that American culture was divided along lines of taste rather than class. "It isn’t wealth or family that makes prestige these days," he said, giving voice to the usual surge of postwar American egalitarianism. "It’s high thinking." Famously titled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," the
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The Maneuvers of Billionaire Collector Eli Broad Have Museum Directors in a Tizzy

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

In his Lives of the Painters the Italian architect, painter and writer Giorgio Vasari relates an hilarious encounter between Michelangelo and Piero Soderini, the head of the Florentine government. They met around the master’s unfinished David, where Soderini found fault with the sculpture’s nose, remarking that it was "too thick." Looking to satisfy the powerful
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