Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Trump administration has tried to physically cordon off Mexico from the United States, and presumably would just as soon exclude the country from America�s cultural orbit as well. From that perspective, the Whitney�s judiciously conceived exhibition �Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art� is […]
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Boy did the otherwise on-the-mark Guardian television critic Lucy Mangan get it wrong. In her 2017 review of the Flemish detective series Professor T, she dismissed the show as �thin gruel� with �morsels pilfered from the greats� (by which she meant such television shows as House, Sherlock, Morse, and Monk). Moreover, she said, its humor is �lost in translation.� What? Did she watch the same show I did? Doth the woman not laugh and weep? Doth the woman not recognize tragicomedy? In short, how did she miss that Professor T is the best television series since The Singing Detective, the riveting 1987 miniseries starring Michael Gambon?
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / Lisa Corinne Davis, whose solo is on view at Pamela Salisbury through November 2, is an abstract painter known for her engaging explorations of map imagery, codes, and drawing systems. Recently she has been thinking about the destablization resulting from Covid, politics, and the current […]
There is a bit of urgency to get out and see some shows in the next few weeks because it looks like we might be faced with another wave of Covid and, thus, another lockdown. In related news, the election is underway, so don’t forget to go out and vote. […]
Contributed by Karen Schifano / Reacting to the overtly emotional critical response to Abstract Expressionism, Frank Stella sought to refine Greenbergian formalism by reducing painting to its value as an object and nothing more. He is famous for saying, �What you see is what you see,� and influenced an entire […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Walking into Michelle Vaughan�s show at Theodore:Art, visitors are confronted with a small oak bookcase, desk, and chair in the center of the gallery. The walls are lined with forty framed portraits of notable conservative women, meticulously rendered in faded pastels on gray paper, that […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / France produces some superb television, but you could be forgiven for entertaining skepticism about L�Art du Crime, which at first blush scans as one extended meet-cute: a tough, dyspeptic, and uncultured flic is in the doghouse and gets assigned to the �cultural property� investigative unit […]
Contributed by Patrick Neal / I�ve been thinking a lot about the work of photographer Jan Groover. This started a few months ago when the artist and critic David Ambrose mentioned her, and I learned she had been a long-term faculty member at SUNY Purchase and teacher of the wildly […]
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / I have known Gideon Bok’s paintings from before I knew Gideon. Like many of his musical idols, he has an unusual cult following that eagerly awaits the twists and turns in his work, which manages to maintain a thematic focus while, at the same time, […]
