A sad reminder of that newer does not mean better, as illustrated by the Getty Center exhibition “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.” The organizers of “Painting Men” which aims to address the shortcomings of Caillebotte scholarship’s “blinkered view” concerning his purported “male bias” and alleged “questioning of masculine identity that seems freshly relevant today” were not deterred […]
Posted on June 30, 2024, 9:00 PM, by jfriedman, under
Uncategorized.
My take on LACMA’s rather disappointing exhibition that tried to make the Great War relevant to museum goers in 2024.
Posted on June 12, 2024, 5:06 PM, by jfriedman, under
Uncategorized.
My latest article for Quillette is about the perfect trifecta of performance art, sensationalist nudity, and media attention.
There is a new contender for the most effective weapon in the propaganda wars: photorealistic, generative AI art.
The Joy of Painting—a TV series hosted by American artist Bob Ross, on which he would conjure up Alaskan landscapes in just 27 minutes of airtime—ran for 403 episodes between 1983 and 1994. Eventually syndicated to almost 300 PBS stations nationwide, it attracted over 80 million daily viewers of varying ages and backgrounds. According to […]
Last November I visited Evan Holloway’s Los Angeles studio to tape our conversation for his upcoming exhibition “Scry if you want to” at Xavier Hufkens. It consisted of three new bodies of work: abstract paintings referencing 16th century writings by the inventors of Enochian magic John Dee and Edward Kelley, large-scale automatic drawings, and welded […]
When Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel Doctor Zhivago, the Soviet press exploded with outrage. The year was 1958, and although Stalin was dead, he had instilled a lingering fear, and despite the liberalizations of his successor, Khruschev, critical portrayals of life in the ussr were still commonly demonized as enemy propaganda. […]