Comfortably Numb
My contribution to David Carrier’s series “The End of Postmodernism” in the December/January opinions section of the Brooklyn Rail.
Posts Tagged ‘Dave Hickey’
2024 Whitney Biennial: What to Expect
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.
Smackdown 101
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 […]
In memory of Dave Hickey
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 […]
Culture Wars 2.0
My review of the first book about the American art and culture critic Dave Hickey is out in Atheneum Review. Click on the image below to read the full text. Oppenheimer is the first writer to dedicate an entire book to Dave Hickey, who is now in his early eighties. Although Hickey made occasional public […]
Icons of happiness
An upcoming Christie’s sale of a stunning Vincent Van Gogh drawing led me to contemplate Dave Hickey’s two decades-old predictions about the danger of shifting our collective gaze from the “beautiful object” to the “rhetoric of virtue.” All, because of a silly headline on CNN.style.com. Click on the image below to read the full article.
On Sexy Art
Quillette just published my article on the relationship between art history and pornography. Click on the image below to read the full text.
