Good sculptures make the ideas they represent self-evident. “The Embrace” by Hank Willis Thomas is a muddled mess, and my latest article in Quillette aims to explain how what was meant as a celebration of the civil rights icon turned into an obscene meme.
Our third article on Damien Hirst’s ongoing NFT project The Currency (co-authored with David Hawkes) is out in Whitehot Magazine one year after it published ‘The Currency’ referendum in November 2021, and four months following the second article that addressed the aftermath of July vote that pitted physical artworks against their digital avatars. Part three focuses on the role of the community, and the shift away from the outmoded omnipotent artist paradigm. We argue that The Currency turns the consumers of the artwork into full-fledged participants of the project, breaking down the wall between the creator and their audience. On the face of it, The Currency fits the definition of “community art.” It also fits the paradigm of what anthropologist David Graeber called “human economies,” which operate through collective social practices, rather than through the mind of an individual genius.
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Quillette just published my article about Ben Sakoguchi’s spectacular smackdown of literalist curators.
Sakoguchi was invited to participate in the revived California Biennial, to be held at the Orange County Museum of Art, which was reopening with great fanfare in a brand new $94 million Morphosis-designed building. The curators had selected a his 16-panel polyptych titled Comparative Religions 101, but But with all the paperwork completed and the artwork ready to ship, Sakoguchi was informed that OCMA’s Education Department had “raised questions about the content of his submission.” The painting contained images of swastikas. Sakoguchi was handed a list of 17 questions the museum wanted him to answer. Three days after submitting his written responses, Sakoguchi was informed that Comparative Religions 101 would not be included in the show “because the museum will not show any work that depicts a swastika.” Having accused an 85-year-old survivor of a Japanese internment camp of hate speech, the curators’ ensuing scramble to save face was tragicomic.
Matt Stromberg’s comprehensive account of the exchanges between the Biennial curators, museum staff, the artist’s studio and his dealers reconstructs the drama that played out between the September 12th rejection and the opening of the Biennial two weeks later. Stromberg recounts the predictable shifting of blame between museum administrators and exhibition curators, the bid to secure a different work by Sakoguchi (declined), the attempts to go behind his back to obtain work from his dealers (unsuccessful), and finally a groveling email imploring the artist to re-enter the offending painting into the exhibition (denied). The California Biennial debacle was a face-off between pedants and poets, and this time the poet won.
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A gonzo, and now veteran (established in 1992), art journal Coagula seemed like a perfect venue to throw well-deserved shade on the newly fashionable A.I.-generated art. In this short essay, I contrast the limited capabilities of computer algorithm with the emotional nuance of analogue human-made art. To read the full article, click on the image below.
Exactly one year ago Christie’s procured a sale of a non-fungible token for an eye-watering sum of US$69,346,250. Since then, my friend and former colleague Professor David Hawkes and I have co-authored a series of articles on the subject of NFTs: their relationship to other currencies, their lack of aura, and their use for art history.
Over the winter break, as I was preparing to teach my usual Spring course on later 20th century art, I reread The Painted Word—an oldie-but-goodie little book by Tom Wolfe originally published as an article in 1974. I was struck by how well the model of modern art’s de-materialization Wolfe constructed (and raged against) fits our current NFT predicament. Wolfe’s astute social comedy that caused outrage among critics and especially artists turned out to be eerily accurate in its predictions of trivialization and monetization of culture that started decades ago, but picked up pace recently.
The resulting analysis “Against De-Materialization: Tom Wolfe in the Are of NFTs” is our fourth article on the subject. It just came out in Quillette (which bravely published my article on the relationship between art history and pornography last summer). In it, we apply Wolfe’s ideas to the new, Twitterfied, reality.
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My tribute to the great Wayne Thiebaud is out in the February issue of The New Criterion—a magazine he had subscribed to for decades. I had the privilege of working with Wayne for the past few years, so the text below contains my insights into this man of impeccable integrity, strong will, and unwavering dedication to painting. Click on the image below to read the article.
During the time of our collaboration (Wayne’s words), I wrote three magazine articles—all published in The New Criterion—and three catalogue essays about his work. First, came the “Hour of the clown,” an article that dealt with social and artistic contexts, as well as the reasons for the timing of his circus-themes series. It was followed by “There ought to be clowns”—a piece on the historic background of the series. An in-depth essay on the topic, titled “Nothing is Unimportant,” was included in Wayne Thiebaud 100 centennial catalogue. Shortly after this essay was published, I took part in a panel discussion “Three Takes on Thiebaud” organized by the Crocker Museum of Art.
The third article on the circus series was “Past continuous.” It explored the parallels between Thiebaud’s direction and T.S. Eliot’s theory of artistic influence. I also contributed an essay “A Masterwork: Thiebaud’s One Hundred-year-old Clown” to the catalogue for the Wayne Thiebaud: Clowns exhibition held at the Laguna Art Museum in 2020-21. As part of the programming for the LAM exhibition the museum recorded my video tour an online lecture on the evolution of the series.
My latest monographic essay on Wayne’s work “Anyone Can be My Protagonist: Wayne Thiebaud’s Unrepresented Spectator” is forthcoming in the volume titled People. The book contains a selection of paintings and drawings of the human figure from the entirety of the painter’s career. This was Wayne last project before his passing on Christmas Day 2021.
I wrote this piece following Dave’s passing November 12, 2021. It was published in the January 2022 issue of The New Criterion magazine. Click on the image to read the full text.
I met Dave in 2012, and three years later we embarked on a project based on his Facebook writings. The result was two pendant volumes, Wasted Words and Dustbunnies, which explored Hickey’s mood over the eighteen months he engaged in debates on social media. It also gave a rare glimpse into what could best be called his verbal ephemera—bon mots and musings that would not necessarily make it into the critic’s honed writings. Times Literary Supplement published a review of the books. A series of in-conversation events in Las Vegas CAC, Site Santa Fe and the UCLA Hammer Museum followed.
The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. (more) Northwestern University Press 7 x 10, 300 pgs, Trade Cloth ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 / $69.95
Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of "dunces" and "pricks." Paperback, 586 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 1517287103
Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from a vast digital discourse that took place in Dave Hickey’s social media space between June 2014 and March 2015. During that time Hickey posted almost 3,000 comments, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes and skeptics. Wasted Words, the resulting volume, is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Paperback, 124 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 152327266X
Over the past seven years Wayne Thiebaud has made dozens of paintings, drawings, and etchings of clowns. Like much of his work, this latest series is in a sense autobiographical. During his boyhood in Long Beach he looked forward to the visits of a traveling Ringling Brothers circus and sometimes helped out behind the scenes in exchange for tickets. The costumes, faces, and antics of the clowns were the beginning of a lifelong fascination for him. The clown series is its culmination, in which the now 100-year-old artist revisits those early memories. In December 2019 Wayne Thiebaud unveiled a selection from his clown series at the San Francisco gallery founded by his son, Paul Thiebaud. The Laguna Art Museum exhibition will be a version of the Paul Thiebaud Gallery exhibition, featuring more than forty works. Fully illustrated with 56 artwork reproductions. Essay by Dr. Julia Friedman. Interview with the artist by Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hardcover: 100 pages; ISBN-10: 0578798573ISBN-13: 978-0578798578
Celebrating the 100th birthday of one of America's most respected and beloved artists, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings honors a lifetime of extraordinary achievements across many genres. Best known for his tantalizing paintings of desserts, Thiebaud has long been affiliated with Pop Art, though his body of work is far more expansive, continuing to grow as the artist approaches his milestone birthday. Across the decades, Thiebaud has explored various details of American life through his art from urban views and rural landscapes to clowns and household items all the time continuing to explore the food subjects that made him famous. Wayne Thiebaud 100 accompanies an exhibition of the same name, organized by the Crocker Art Museum. In addition to the 100 paintings, prints, and drawings featured in the exhibition, this publication includes numerous other contextual paintings by Thiebaud, art by the masters who inspired him, and photographs of the artist with family and friends, taken over the course of his extraordinary career. Hardcover : 212 pages ISBN-10 : 1087501172 Dimensions : 9.8 x 0.9 x 11.3 inches ISBN-13 : 978-1087501178
Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev Adele Marie Barker (Editor), Eliot Borenstein (Contributor), Julia Friedman (Contributor), Adam Weiner (Contributor), Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky (Contributor), Robert Edelman (Contributor) With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors... (more) Paperback: 488 pages Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 10, 1999) Language: English ISBN-10: 0822323133 ISBN-13: 978-0822323136
“A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance as Life-Writing” by Julia Friedman In Symbolism, its Origins and Consequences. Edited by Rosina Neginsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010 Hardcover: 665 pages Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing New edition edition (October 1, 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 1443823929 ISBN-13: 978-1443823920
“The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov,” by Julia Friedman "Elective affinities" - a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry - here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal... In In Elective Affinities: Word & Image Interactions 6, 2008 Edited by Catriona McLeod, Véronique Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Paperback: 422 pages Publisher: Rodopi (June 20, 2009) Language: English ISBN-10: 9042026189 ISBN-13: 978-9042026186
“Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act,” by Julia Friedman. Edited by Maurice Geracht and Frédéric Ogée. In Interfaces: Image Text Language, vol. 29, 2010
Julia Friedman
