Posted on April 5, 2024, 5:35 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
This article published in Quillette is a cautionary tale about what happens when while looking at a painting one only sees their own reflection. As the historian Christopher Lasch pointed out four decades ago, disproportionate concern with “identity” is directly linked to the difficulties of establishing the boundaries of selfhood. And without the certainty of […]
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Art History,
Christopher Lasch,
Claude Gellée,
Greek mythology,
Instagram video,
museums,
Narcissus and Echo,
National Gallery,
Ovid,
painting,
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Posted on March 20, 2024, 12:07 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
The April issue of the New Criterion has my article about the Santa Barbara Museum of Art debacle—the eleventh-hour cancellation of the “Three American Painters: Then and Now” exhibition, and the firing of its curator Dr. Eik Kahng. Read and weep.
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Amada Cruz,
Art History,
Eik Kahng,
Frank Stella,
ideology,
idiocracy,
Jules Olitsky,
Kenneth Noland,
Michael Fried,
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Santa Barbara Museum of Art,
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Posted on March 2, 2024, 2:21 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
While the Whitney Museum of American Art’s webpage still defines the Whitney Biennial as “the longest-running survey of American art” (emphasis added), this year’s eighty-first installment will expand its reach well beyond the United States. The show includes artists from Chile, Britain, Korea, Indonesia, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, Switzerland, Lebanon, Singapore, Mongolia, Finland, Sweden, Croatia, India, Mexico, and China. This mad dash for inclusivity is consistent with the theme of the 2024 Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere,” but, whereas Venice’s has always been an international affair, the Whitney’s has always been national, making it a radical departure.
My last article published in 2023 was about the Getty exhibition of William Blake, the unrelenting radical who once said that “Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on.” One wonders what the famously recalcitrant artist, poet, and religious visionary would have made of his work being presented by an institution whose […]
Posted on November 10, 2023, 3:20 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
In these movements we find defiant artists who, disgusted with the pretense of a corrupt civilization, went on to disassociate from the art that represented this civilization. For moral and not formal reasons, they sought to turn the page on the art that had come before—in Dada’s case, traditional and even modernist painting; in the case of Art Informel, on geometric abstraction á la Piet Mondrian. These artists voted with their brushes. Regardless of whether we like its results, this response of withdrawal and rejection is perfectly understandable.
In contrast, today’s artists opt for the activist mode to show their disillusionment with humanity. They vote with their keyboards, venting by e-signing, and then, e-withdrawing their signatures, before e-apologizing.
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 […]