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Go beyond the blog!  Search or browse this site's archive, for dozens of full-length essays in review. My contributions also appear regularly in ArtBistro and elsewhere. But now for Today's Art News & Views in brief . . .

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5.15.08 — CONTRACTED OUT

Gedi Sibony's new work looks ever so familiar. A long rectangle of industrial carpeting hangs down on the far wall, facing one directly as one enters, and continues a few feet along the floor. A larger swath forms roughly a square off to one side, but with a healthy corner missing in parallel to the corner of the room. The mark of a fold or two, at right angles to an edge, insists on the work's geometry. For a moment, one might mistake it for an assembly of smaller squares, like a carpet of floor tiles. Had I not seen both shapes before, the rectangle and the square?

Of course I had, but with a harder edge. Richard Serra has draped rolled steel across wall and floor, and Carl Andre has tiled much of a room in bright metal. And once one starts seeing a kinder, gentler Minimalism, Sibony makes it hard to stop. Perhaps an upright board beside a wall derives from John McCracken's plywood and polyester planks, but half smothered in something softer. Perhaps the two cutaway cardboard boxes replicate Don Judd on the cheap, for they have acquired his sense of light from within. In the bent pole of aluminum blinds, apparently folded up and fallen to the floor, one could almost see a white fluorescent tube that Dan Flavin had left out to die.

By that point a critic is trying way too hard, but this art cherishes failure. Its particles of American industry have taken their share of hits. An abbreviated curtain never quite interrupts the entryway, and a small, open sculpture of twisted metal barely sustains its dance on the floor. Like a proper Minimalist, Sibony makes one attend to one's surroundings, at Greene Naftali through May 24, and they look truly forlorn. I had never known the eighth-floor gallery so empty and discontinuous, and I had never seen it so dwarf the art. I had never seen it, too, half in darkness, with only natural light.

These tatters of office life could fit easily with "Unmonumental" at the new New Museum or the ragtag 2008 Whitney Biennial. Again, if the work looks familiar, it should. However, those shows asserted their decrepitude with pride. They built volumes out of found parts and called it a map of America. Sibony's latest seems not so much "Undone" or unfinished as finished and done with long ago. The last one to stop making art remembered to turn out the lights.

Sibony himself should seem familiar. The New York native appeared in the 2006 Biennial and, the year before, in "Greater New York." A solo show elsewhere laid out a path through the gallery, much like the curtain here and the carpet rectangle beyond. Critics often compare him to Richard Tuttle, a reminder that Minimalism anticipated its own creative destruction. Serra's steel shape may itself derive from fabric—the tapestry behind a throne, only with an absent monarch. What goes around comes around.

In coping with a larger space this time out, Sibony makes more of failure. The room and the work lend each other structure. The objects seem less like random intrusions and more like canny survivors. The materials could have lain there since Chelsea's entirely real commercial past, and their drabness says something real about past and present. If they do allude more directly to older art, it is because memory entails absence. When the next exhibition refurnishes the room, it will have to contend with other contractors that have come and gone.

5.12.08 — HUNTING THE RENAISSANCE

With its exhibition title, through August 10, The Morgan Library announces that it is "Illuminating the Medieval Hunt," and so it is. Its miniatures take one step by step through a medieval pastime, just as they would have guided the duke of Burgundy and later the king of Spain. They outline a ritual as exotic and elaborate as the manuscript itself. Here it all is, from preparations for the hunt through its success. It is also the subject of a new and longer review, in my latest upload.

The exhibition title only begins to tell the story. Le Livre de la Chasse, or book of the hunt, offers prescriptions for an aristocratic age. It documents one art form, the medieval hunt, but it represents the final glories of another, the illuminated manuscript. At the same time, one can see a beginning. At the start of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance is about to unfold. Here, one can literally turn the page.

The duke of Burgundy may have intended it for the instruction of his son, John the Fearless, but it became a far more popular item. At the Morgan, three walls display just under fifty pages, along with a facsimile, so that one can imagine flipping through the rest. On the center tables and elsewhere, it exhibits other works on the theme of hunting, from as early as the eleventh century. They include the first printed editions of Le Livre de la Chasse, along with the first printed book on hunting and other examples of the new, reproducible medium. Culture was passing to a whole new, middle-class audience, as was so much else. In due course, a certain robber baron founded the Morgan Library.

Le Livre de la Chasse may sound remote. This is not hunting with buckshot in your companion's face or hunting to show voters that you love guns. The book's final section describes ways to sniff out, trap, and otherwise set up quarry so that one can quickly pick them off. It also describes these approaches as ignoble, unworthy not just of aristocrats, but of the animals themselves. In those last pages, they look noble, while the humans have the cramped, ugly scowls of the lower class—or maybe Dick Cheney on vacation in Texas.

What makes that time and place so modern, then? Le Livre de la Chasse does not just build on the International Style, although it does that, too. Rather, it pares things back so that it can start afresh. The artists populate their stage with close observation. Realism here includes the ample depth for the action. In one scene, a city emerges from below a hill and below the horizon, foretelling a Renaissance landscape stretching to infinity. Primarily, though, realism means the study of behavior, whether human or animal.

Its social psychology ranges from riders in pursuit to the meaner types with their nets. The dogs have a whole lifetime of behaviors, from work to play. I liked best, however, the first section, for the animals. Which will run free as individuals, and which will nurture each other in groups? Which indulge in play fighting, and which fight each other for real? To conduct the hunt nobly, on the animal's terms, "know your enemy"—but now art wants to know it all.

5.10.08 — GIRLS IN THEIR SUMMER DRESSES

When I think of Amy Cutler, I remember the white space—not just of a drawing, but of a national agenda about to begin. She roots her drawings in rural America and the indefinite past. Without outlines, she creates a pattern of dark hair, high cheekbones, and gingham and hoop dresses. However, her women inhabit a field not of earth and sky but only of white. More hints of the paper peek through as highlights. (I should have told you much earlier about her latest exhibition, but this had first to appear in slightly different form in May's Artillery magazine.)

Cutler appeared in quick succession at the 2004 Biennial, the Brooklyn Museum's "Open House," and "Greater New York" at P.S. 1, and in no time the emerging artist had a following. Make that a cult following, appropriate to women that might themselves belong to a sect. They may take on animal heads, willingly or not, as in some unstated ritual. Often they act in concert, so that the subdued tones clump further together, as in a 2003 drawing titled Army of Me. In one drawing that appeared at Leslie Tonkonow, through April 5, they lie side by side in the same bed. They do not look comfortable, but then they never have.

They insist on an American myth, but one that art normally overlooks. For once, the landscape has no trace of real or urban cowboys, broad horizons or dark alleys. One cannot even say for sure whether the women are settling Puritan New England or the Wild West. A drawing's simplicity embeds them further in nature. It also leaves meanings wide open. Fans can read into the drawings whatever they want, and I suppose they do.

Native craft may sound liberating, but all this display of pattern and decoration never simply affirms pre- or post-feminist success. Men could have forced her women into all this, or they could be forcing each other. Back at P.S. 1, the medium and the subject of women without men linked her to another emerging artist, Amy Wilson. However, Wilson's blonds adapted from Henry Darger think for themselves, about art and politics in the present, while Cutler's do not even want to have fun.

At the heart of the new show, a sculpture tilts the balance further from light to darkness. Small cast figures pack tightly around a wooden table. The women are knitting, in a frenzy of American industry, and yet they hold their hands apart for someone else to wield the needles. The white string confines them all in a web with scant promise of a fabric or a geometry. A similar dark weave seemed to prevent women from fleeing as a baby carriage fell from the sky in an earlier drawing, Futile Flight.

The web also extends to the gallery floor, where the remainder of more than a hundred figurines kneel, lie, or sit facing front and center. Their summer dresses trail behind them, but only sometimes suggestive of flowing motion. At least as often the trail cuts off their legs, leaving only a stump, or merges with their butt like the tail of an animal. Spareness and ambiguity also translate into a kind of reserve. Here I wanted the sculpture larger, as a more ironic or frightening monument to feminism, but I admire the experiment all the same. Besides, to make up for the absence of paper, the women all wear white.

5.8.08 — OFF THE CHARTS

When people remember a rivalry between Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, they mean more than bragging rights. They have in mind line and color, but also so much more—the intellect and the imagination, the fourth dimension and a red tablecloth, disfigured women and The Joy of Life. Did Picasso and Braque set painting free of colored surfaces? It took Matisse, so they say, to set color free.

The story overlooks Matisse's line and Cubism's wealth of sensation, but it has a kernel of truth: the identification of color with pleasure, black and white with "just the facts," has a long history. With "Color Chart: Reinventing Color," through this weekend, the Modern is out to turn the story upside-down—and it is the subject of a new, longer review in my latest upload. I incorporate some musings on Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" and a shorter review of "Design and the Elastic Mind" that recently appeared on this page in an earlier form. Both exhibitions suggest a Modernism haunted by dreams of freedom and of a utopia in which to fulfill them, one through art's autonomy and the other through function.

Maybe Abstract Expressionism blew the opposition between line and color away long ago, but not for Ann Temkin. As curator for "Color Chart," she sees artists as only beginning to set color free, continuing even today. As David Batchelor puts it, Modernism suffered from chromophobia, but the color chart came to the rescue. Moreover, they both see it as imposing an almost stifling constraint. In dreams begin some very serious responsibilities.

Just who is afraid of color, Virginia Woolf? Not Marcel Duchamp in 1918, with the onrushing color samples of his Tu M', or Robert Rauschenberg, who allowed a horizontal line of them to bisect a combine painting. MOMA's turns both works into fresh discoveries. The guards' colored vests, designed by Daniel Buren, similarly get the show off to a creative start. None of this has the least to do with Impressionism's quest for light, color-field painting's quest for the art object, or Josef Alber's quest for the logic of perception.

"Color Chart" offers at least two distinct notions of the ready-made as well. On the one hand, color supplies the found materials of painting. Frank Stella first adopted household paints when he moved to New York, to save money, and he spoke of wanting it to "look as good as it did in the can." In Rebus Rauschenberg used whatever discarded paint he could find, and he made himself stick to a can until it ran out. On the other hand, color appears as a ready-made concept. It motivates Andy Warhol in his deliciously half-finished Paint by Numbers, Walid Raad's downtown Beirut spattered with the colors of bullet fragments, Dan Graham's documentary collage, Yves Klein's trademark blue, Lawrence Weiner's wall text, and Sherrie Levine's appropriation of Le Corbusier.

Like many a utopian or idealist, however, Temkin and Batchelor demand austerity from their followers and even more from their leaders. They are all too determined to set color free—not just of extrinsic purpose, but often of complexity, controversy, context, and joy. Sometimes, though, autonomy does not translate into detachment from this world after all. With Carrie Mae Weems's overlay of text about race on photographs tinted like archival sources and with Byron Kim's wall of skin tones, one gets a reminder of what else color means in America. Batchelor's photos by the exit get the first and last word after all. Ironically enough, his city walls carry their own scars and their own very human history.

5.6.08 — DIVORCE CHELSEA STYLE

Every artist has a history. A CV unfolds as a record of achievements, but also of lost hopes—the group show that never led to solo representation, the solo shows as a trail of broken relationships. Dealers move on. Artists move on, or at least they can hope.

In the last few weeks the drama got some star turns. In The Times for April 18, Roberta Smith reviewed several artists of note who had traded up, she wrote, for "new management, in a grander setting, with more lavish trimmings." In his blog that same day, Ed Winkleman wrote about the end of a relationship from a gallery's perspective. An artist whom he had dropped, Nancy Baker, had already blogged about her "pink slip," sharing her thoughts from that first "inconsolable" moment to at last "looking forward to another walk on the wild side." Winkleman was responding to the uplift, but also to the bitterness. "Where," he asked, "is the humanity in all this?"

Winkleman was questioning himself as much as Smith's star cast, as one might expect from a dealer of integrity, and his answer aimed to put things in perspective. He noted the corporate world's far more abrupt and pitiless dismissals, an honest dealer's efforts to ease the artist's sad transition, and his own difficulty in making a break with his artists. A business partner had departed, his gallery's roster had shrunk as its vision changed, and it hurt every step of the way. For all its frankness, however, his account still had some glaring omissions. As a rule, whenever you hear, in effect, "this will hurt me more than it hurt you," you can rest assured that the speaker will never have to weigh the experiences personally. To his credit, however, Winkleman invited an open discussion and received more than a hundred replies.

These comments, especially his own, helped with at least one of the missing pieces. Smith for once had allowed herself the tone of a proud but awkward insider, like a gossip columnist, and her review had shed little or no light on an artist's motivations. John Currin looked better at his old joint, she thought. Besides, the galleries at stake all have duly exalted status, and the winners and losers overlapped. Instead of "the sundering of a marriage of old friends," as she called it, one pictures an extended episode of Wife Swap. No wonder her "invitation to a second wedding" made her uncomfortable.

Winkleman insists that he bases decisions not on an artist's sales, but on his program. Only a few Chelsea galleries hold out for just one kind of artist—where I might think of Margaret Thatcher and Elizabeth Harris for color-field abstraction, Bitforms and Eyebeam for digital art, Aperture and Bruce Silverstein (like Higher Pictures uptown) for photography, a determined cluster on 25th Street for soft-focus realism, or Mary Boone for sheer attitude. However, Winkleman argued, a dealer needs a well-defined program in order to support the artists properly by forging a public, and the artists should feel that they support each other. In other words, personal loyalty does matter, and indeed artists often jump ship motivated by just that, much as Willem de Kooning once followed Xavier Fourcade from Knoedler, where Fourcade had worked, to his own gallery off Park Avenue. Unfortunately, Winkleman did little to explain what a program or support means in practice. Then again, maybe if one could articulate it, one would have the formula for a successful gallery.

I felt a larger omission, though, in his or Nancy Baker's promise of an ending—or at least a new beginning. In the real world, every gap in a CV is a nightmare, whether for young artists eager to prove they are ready for the spotlight or for older artists, often with an incredible body of work, desperate to prove that the money machine has not churned them up and cast them aside. When they trade up, it is because others have let them down. When they fall through the cracks, they may never surface again. A player is bound to lose touch, even a player as relatively open-minded as Winkleman or Smith. For all her insight as a critic, her talk of old friends and wedding invitations evokes a private world that most artists and their dealers will never, ever know.

5.4.08 — IF DESIGN GOVERN

Probably nothing could detach MOMA from Modernism or Modernism from utopian visions. No, curators in jet packs will not fly through the twenty-first century atrium. All the same, Modernism still conjures up white squares floating above Malevich's Russia and fateful towers on the outskirts of Le Corbusier's Paris. And artists will still damn the Modern for them—more and more often on the museum's own walls.

Through May 12 the Museum of Modern Art has once again seen the future, and it works frighteningly well. "Design and the Elastic Mind" displays architecture and design as extensions of "disruptive innovation" in science and technology. The sheer number of objects attests to energy and ambition, but also to the threat of information overload. So does the low lighting and frequent sharp turns into new alcoves. They allow digital work to play out undisturbed, off a central partition resembling a spidery, extended Sol LeWitt wall drawing. However, they also supply the atmosphere of a darkened theater and keep much of the show at any moment just out of reach.

The term elastic suggests flexibility and gentle curves, in contrast to Bauhaus geometries. It almost pushes such historical details as Eero Saarinen's curvaceous architecture or an Olivetti typewriter out of mind. It also poses a question: will the average human mind prove elastic enough to keep up with computers and their operators? Right on the entrance wall, a spray gun continuously retraces the exhibition title in flowing black curves, to the point of effacing legibility. Intentionally or not, the device also looks awfully like a surveillance camera.

The show has an exhilarating progression, from molecules to mappings of urban and global communities. Naturally these extremes have a way of merging. Nanostructures might resemble futuristic cities, while a two-inch smiley turns out to contain nothing but DNA. The visual traces of all the taxis in San Francisco could easily appear in a show of digital art, and one might finally learn how to find a cab in the rain. Works also juxtapose the betterment of humanity alongside devices for human control—and these, too, can get difficult to tell apart. As one contribution puts it, Do You Want to Replace the Existing Normal?

No doubt one can safely classify soft computers, interface devices for the handicapped, "socially responsible objects for children," and the Architecture and Justice project among the good guys. A living-room wall structured from flowers might, as quite another work puts it, celebrate the "mental, spiritual and sensorial dimension" in design. Others have clearly gone over to the dark side, like the computer game that inflicts physical pain. However, are Chocolate Nipples or Accessories for Lonely Men more like creature comforts and kindly pets or Internet porn? Culture Badges may "encourage communication," but they sure sound like the instruments of a police state. Jewelry made of human bone commemorates a bond but sure gives me the creeps.

Modernism had room for irony, darkness, and self-criticism as well as idealism all along. No wonder neither Hitler nor Stalin had much patience with it. Could one find a utopia—or a god—by an argument from design? Long before the nanotech revolution Robert Frost looked at a spider, "fat and white," and found only "design of darkness" in its dimples, "if design govern in a thing so small." Conversely, faced with Postmodernism's culture of images celebrated by Jean Baudrillard, one hardly knows at times whether to see a critique of capitalism or a trembling before the apocalypse. Postmodern design may not have cast away utopia or dystopia so much as intermingled them, colorfully, elastically, and even thrillingly.

5.02.08 — CITY LIGHTS

Maybe art can no longer believe in Modernism's "make it new," but it can still make things strange. Several artists have returned to settings that Edward Hopper would recognize as his own and that Alfred Stieglitz might have photographed. Each has an abortive love affair with cities and towns, big and small, and they are the subject of my latest upload. This bit of housecleaning brings together some brief reviews that appeared on this page in an earlier form, most recently Gregory Crewdson. However, it allows me to review some other artists as well—most notably Anne Hardy, at Bellwether through May 17.

Crewdson captures two years in the life of a small town. It could lie upstate, and yet to all appearances he might have invented it. Sherry Karver and E. E. Smith turn to New York City itself, to see how individuals can elude today's surveillance cameras. Ron Diorio spans rural settings and city stoops, manipulating a painterly blur with digital precision. At least one, Karver, really is a painter. Each manipulates the light in order to see it, and each knows how the apparent clarity of vision can mask the strangeness of what it observes.

Now that everything seems an appropriation, artists were bound to look back to earlier forms of modernity. And after 9/11 and the National Security Act, maybe the same shows were bound to obsess with the act of looking. I do not know whether to call the settings for Hopper's invasions of privacy public or private, but even their quaintness seems contemporary. Between cinema and Photoshop, however, the means to examine those settings is getting complicated. As it happens, H. and D. Zielske need only an unreal city and a long exposure, Michael Schmidt hangs around in his drab scene, and Hardy has invented her environment without even a computer.

Urban photography before World War II helped put New York on the map of modern art, so no wonder artists might be looking back in strange ways. In "Megalopolis Shanghai," at Von Lintel through May 17, Zielske and Zielske heighten the crispness of highway ramps and the harsh color of artificial lights. If I had any doubts that globalization is producing an awful, futuristic landscape, I would have set them aside. A month before at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Michael Schmidt almost convinced me that Berlin has not gotten any warmer since the wall came down. And he was photographing his friends.

Hardy penetrates interiors, but one could take her most striking stage set for yet another megalopolis. The stacks of stereo speakers suggest a dense array of skyscrapers that Le Corbusier would have loved, at least until he saw a couple of stuffed animals peeking through. The sleek black towers have a geometry that plays against her love of disorder. Elsewhere the latter can devolve into a lecture, although a fashionable one. The touches of cuteness, like those animals, also exemplify an unwillingness to let go and an eagerness to please. Still, one has fun comparing the created environments to possible lifestyles.

For each work, the British photographer drags what she can into her studio for a low-tech fairground. As with the speakers and the color black, most of her vacant rooms would look quite at home in Williamsburg. They also come ever so close to cohering. One includes a target riddled with holes, as the focus of a confined space. Another rests a dumbbell on the kind of wheel that a carnival geek might spin. It becomes the platform for a ride or perhaps a workout session, and it also returns to her theme of disorder and chance.

4.30.08 — TOWNIES

Gregory Crewdson may finally be learning to look. It must sound like a strange thing to say about any photographer, but especially one with so much time on his hands. At Luhring Augustine through this weekend, Crewdson follows a small town over two years—from winter into summer and from winter into summer again. It must sound stranger still for this photographer, but for quite the opposite reason. Who else stages and lights a scene with such obvious artifice, rather than observe what is there?

Of course, he has plenty of competition. Jeff Wall stages his scenes, and Thomas Struth does not, but both photographers are all about whether art can impose order on life. Andreas Gursky glorifies the obsession for order in others, Thomas Demand fears it, and Anne Hardy has fun with it. Crewdson, however, takes an obsession with staging an act and then looking at it as his theme. In his interiors, ordinary looking people carry on in strange and seductive ways, the kind that made him an obvious choice for "Family Pictures" not long ago at the Guggenheim. Johanna Drucker calls then a "flirtation with the culture of mass production," and she is right about the culture. For Crewdson, however, the object is more a fetish than a flirt.

Crewdson has turned to landscape, but he still prefers theater to nature. At nearly five feet in height and nearly seven and a half feet wide, the ink-jet prints have the amplitude of a big screen but the aspect ratio of a common camera. A man trudges through the snow right beneath a movie marquee. A couple laze in the woods, and a boy looks up into the mist, toward the sunlight, God, or maybe ET. From its decrepit main street and well-worn automobiles to its distant hills and modern offices, the small town promises little but still wants to have it all. Even the cycle of the seasons has to play out twice over, as if eternity were not enough.

The artist has worked outdoors before—by the looks of it, in the same town. He still brings to it the crew of a feature film. He still dares one to piece together the unstated narrative and how he possibly pulled it off. He repeats some of his own tropes, too, such as a naked, pregnant woman where she could not possibly belong. Someone should write an essay about that image, in artists from John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage to Justine Kurland and Catherine Opie. Like them, Crewdson is ever so shocked by the violation of ideal beauty but all the more eager to associate women with the cosmos.

Still, something has changed: these scenes invite contemplation. Every scene has people, but one has to seek them out to invade their privacy, and it hardly seems to matter whether one finds them. Spotted through windows beyond a garage roof or playground, they do not flirt back. A woman in her bathroom reveals herself, but only in a bedroom mirror. Where landscape before served primarily as stage set, here nature has its own theater, with its seasons as the acts.

While no one could say that Crewdson has lightened up, he has come to accept the light. He softens the former contrast between heavy fog and harshly modeled human beings. Between the extremes, he brings out the texture of leaves and snow, and he lets the eye wander to the edge of the frame. Look long enough, and one might find a sunset as well. He still enjoys the setup, like the light on a couple's faces behind the wheel, when the car's headlights should leave them in darkness. Crewdson appropriates Edward Hopper, but Hopper himself makes a pretty respectable observer.

4.28.08 — INTERROGATE ME

Of course, the Whitney Biennial is the show everyone loves to hate. But does everyone have to hate the wall labels, too? As I wrote soon after the opening, "the show may serve as a Rorschach test for contemporary art." Now the laboratory subjects are obsessed with its language.

In her blog, Carol Diehl has offered up some real howlers—what she labels "Impenetrable Prose at the Whitney Biennial." According to one curator, Carol Bove's " 'settings' draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings." MK Guth "creates space for the articulation of intention," and so on. Man, I need my space, too. Another smart blogger, Catherine Spaeth, warns of the anti-intellectualism of the blogosphere. She has a very good point, too, but naturally no one wants to defend nonsense.

Conservative culture critics live for moments like this. In the Wall Street Journal, Eric Gibson quickly pined for "The Lost Art of Writing About Art," pointing to such models as Erwin Panofsky, the great historian of the Northern Renaissance. Only slightly tongue in cheek, Richard Lacayo in Time handily boils things down to five words worth banning—interrogates, problematizes, references (as a verb), transgressive, and inverts—and ugly words they are. Only one problem: what started as Diehl's sensible assault on lazy writing and lazy thinking has become an excuse for yet another cliché, contemporary art destroyed by academic theory. One can fairly ask whether radical art and philosophy can exist after Modernism, especially every other year at the Whitney. But complaining about the challenge is not going to make it any easier.

One theme of this site is that art takes words, not just good taste. It also takes patience—patience with artists and writers who invent challenges to the familiar. Appeals to lost standards make no sense when art has spent more than a lifetime making those standards obsolete. As Bernard Williams, the late Cambridge philosopher, said about ethics, "There is no going back on reflection." Panofsky did more than anyone to interrogate me—excuse me, to turn me on to art. In his Studies in Iconology and Early Netherlandish Painting, he used new vocabularies to find hidden meaning in Jan van Eyck or a Netherlandish diptych, more like Robert Smithson than Hilton Kramer, and his essay on the movies approaches structuralism.

Cries for simplicity merely reinforce the real problem, market pressures that drive the perpetual art fair and that make careers hard to sustain. In fact, those same pressures determine gallery and museum prose far more than does scholarship. The pressures produce the Met's bloated claims for lesser work and loaded attributions. They produce press releases in what I have called martspeak (and I am especially grateful to Diehl for quoting me at length). They make me want to add at least one fashionable term to Lacayo's list, gallerist. In contrast, the Whitney's vocabulary is not all that abstruse, just strung together like a Dada performance.

The 2008 Biennial does say a lot about the art of its time—here and there, even intentionally. As I wrote back in 1997 about martspeak,

"Putting it all on critics is like blaming psychologists for all the managerial vocabulary of vision, impact, and change. Maybe money talks and bullshit walks, but they also talk intimately to each other."

Art and ideas can still matter, but do not hold your breath waiting for the Journal or Time to stand in the way of free markets. "What I'm calling for," Diehl adds, "is not a 'dumbing down' but a 'smartening up.' " Without that, art becomes just a dreadfully expensive variety of mass entertainment, like Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim or ©MURAKAMI in Brooklyn.

4.26.08 — OUT WITH A BANG

Cai Guo-Qiang starts his show at the Guggenheim, like everything else, with a bang. Through May 28, a flat-panel monitor shows an explosion at night in Times Square, as billboards flash and headlights speed on by. By comparison, the conflagration near the ground has almost a human scale—just one bonfire of the vanities among so many others.

Is it a parable of capitalism, an ad, a "threat to our freedoms," or a work of art? Or is it just one more stage in the Disneyfication of art and the Guggenheim? As the museum's director, Thomas Krens, quits, Cai makes obvious what twenty years of empire building have left behind, and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload. Although the review is new, it draws on remarks on Krens's departure that first appeared on this page in an earlier form.

The Chinese artist has a habit of making things visually explicit. He had better, for conceptually the works run every which way and none. For summer sculpture at the Met in 2006, he displayed birds smashed up against a tall pane of glass. He refers both to birds that die because they cannot recognize a skyscraper and to the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. Does he equate murderers with innocent victims of human overreach? Does he explain the attackers away as enthralled by the impersonal heights of Western finance and culture?

More likely, he just does not think too hard, and he would just as soon others do not either. He says that he does not mind if someone misses the association with 9/11. In fact, no one could recognize all the stories that he packs into bravura installations, and he likes it that way. A more active viewer might oblige him to share center stage. More than anything, his retrospective announces the place in the museum of the celebrity artist. Cai calls his retrospective "I Want to Believe," but mostly this exile on Museum Mile believes in himself.

I get a rush myself from installations like these, too, just as I show up for the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Cai, of course, relies on China's legendary invention for his best-known work. Videos show several controlled explosions, including lines of (American-made) gunpowder that race against a train or that "extend" the Great Wall of China. Other works apply gunpowder to canvas. They make abstract painting the record of its own destruction, as with Lucio Fontana. As with Arte Povera, too, ashes leave soft textures, formlessness, and a museum-quality patina. After a tough evening of video games, a curator needs the rest and reassurance.

I do not object to the political messages—earnest, thought provoking, self-contradictory, destructive, or merely inane. This work is ideological rather than political, and its ideology of globalization has more to do with art markets than human rights or Asian economic policy. Like Matthew Barney, it offers the comforting pretence of a street performer but with access to millions and production values to match. It also makes perfect sense as a last statement from the Guggenheim's departing director.

4.24.08 — ORPHAN ON

Anna Craycroft opens with images of children—nearly three hundred of them, covering the walls in a tight, regular array. On closer inspection, make that posters of children. At eight-by-ten inches, the ink-jet prints include names and brief descriptions, as if left on a lamppost for a lost child. Just who is pleading, however, and to whom? The artist gives height and weight in both inches and centimeters. Somehow, this cry for help has global reach.

Make that cinematic reach. Soon enough one notices names and faces from the movies, not the streets of New York. Have you seen Oliver? They include Disney cartoons along with Hollywood stills, Cinderella along with Huckleberry Finn and Jane Eyre. Some of the names appear a second or third time with different faces, no doubt from the remake, and all are orphans. One could lament their loss as one's own.

Through this weekend, Craycroft invites one to do just that. She also invites one upstairs at Tracy Williams, Ltd., to a private garden for meditation. One can sit on a bench, flanked by the Amazing Luminous Fountains on opposite walls. Water pours like tears from the faces of two children, male and female, onto the unyielding stone pebbles. Perhaps the lament really is a child's, like the one heard back downstairs, stumbling with one finger to pick out the opening notes of "Where Is Love?" I sung that song, from the Broadway musical, again and again to myself as a boy.

Had I begun to identify, then, with a child's lament? If so, I was experiencing, as Craycroft calls her show, "The Agency of the Orphan." As defined ever so carefully in the stairwell's wall text, right down to a pronunciation guide, the supposed condition involves identifying oneself with the condition of an orphan. Upstairs in the "reading room," one can read a bound scholarly essay on the phenomenon, divided into three "books," while overlooked by their Archetypes—larger pencil drawings of some of the same children. No need to hurry. The room is comforting, and most of the volume is pictures anyway, including some disconcerting choices from fine art.

The explanation ricochets through history, the birth of the novel, popular culture, Structuralism, and psychoanalysis. "The agency of the orphan" has an uncanny resemblance to "the agency of the letter" in the writings of Jacques Lacan, the French analyst who owned a notorious female nude by Gustave Courbet. Bereft of both parents, Craycroft argues, an orphan stands for "absolute lack," Lacan's equivalent of desire. In turn, orphans have total freedom and, in happy endings, infinite mental resources. I know I do. Craycroft calls the framed prints Headshots, like those of actors in need of work, and perhaps they do, too.

If you believe any of that, you have become part of not just of a cultural disorder but an installation. The artist is pursuing her "private research and study endeavor," she insists, but in a suspiciously public setting. The art could illustrate the essay, or the essay could extend the frame of the art. The search for recovery could belong to the viewer, the subjects, the actors, or their "agents." An artist, too, identifies with her subject while isolating it, representing it, seeking it obsessively, and falsifying it into a role or an archetype. In the flood of images, music, water, and ideas, this artist is never going to be in Kansas anymore.

BTW: a review in The Times took Craycroft to be genuinely serving up an afterthought to her research in print, like a scholar dabbling in art. The reviewer, Ken Johnson, found the result worthwhile but lacking in visual interest. Now, granted that he lives for the artist's personal gesture and judges every show accordingly, and granted that I tend to see irony everywhere. All the same, it was ludicrous. Can we at least agree that the show uses a heck of media because it cares about the viewer's sensual experience?

4.22.08 — SCRATCH AND SNIFF

Pop Art, Minimalism, conceptualism, neo-expressionism, Postmodernism, feminism, and on and on and on—the -isms of art's past half century may not have much else in common, but pretty much all first came to attention as assaults on the idea of "pure" painting. In the clutter and litter of "Unmonumental" at the New Museum, the 2008 Biennial, and so many other trashy installations these days, the assault has taken on a life of its own all but apart from the need for art. But then art movements always outgrow their initial anger, wonder, and critique. Echoes of abstraction's past, as in Katy Moran's creamy easel paintings at Andrea Rosen through April 23, have a way of turning into pleasant academic exercises.

By the same token, how pure was painting was all along? Retrospectives from the 1970s keep asking just that, and one could easily push the question back to Willem de Kooning's Woman I or Jackson Pollock's drips. Larry Silver's new work, in the project room at Lesley Heller through April 26, might seem never to have given up on painting's autonomy. It has no subject, accidents, or cigarette ends. In each, rectangular panels hang side by side, sopping up the light. Their layers of oil and graphite come as close to the paradoxical buzzwords of flatness and objecthood as Clement Greenberg might wish.

But does he ever work those layers. Opaque white never quite effaces thick black curves. Scratches weather the darker surfaces. The multiple panels themselves call attention to the varieties of texture and the varied relationships between process and drawing. So do the colors—in browns, blues, and greens that make the most of small divergences from black and white. One of the three paintings looks quite comfortable hung low, settling into its horizontal space along the wall. The clay board as ground brings them that much closer to the build-up and abrasion of an early Brice Marden.

The bareness and layering make them flatter and less illusionistic than even Marden's. Curves penetrate the oil rather than loop across each other. One can still look for an image in the swirls and chicken scratches, which hover near the center of a panel. Silver's titles may refer to clouds or architecture. However, they earn their impurity the hard way. The artist does not so much drag things in from the outside as rough things up from the inside.

In the gallery's main spaces, Deborah Brown repopulates the New York metropolitan area. Birds soar and mammals cavort beneath the Bayonne and Brooklyn Bridges. The deer and the antelope play in front of an industrial skyline and the World's Fair grounds, where a dinosaur lumbers gleefully toward the New York State pavilion. After a few million years, no wonder the Philip Johnson towers stand in need of preservation. Brown often punches up the colors as well as the action, as in her playful animal tilings for the West Houston Street IRT. Beneath the fancy, though, is a grounding in landscape, both in more naturalistic paintings of Connecticut and in airier sketches, where lines and loops are in no hurry to cohere.

For all the references to a world before humankind, I kept seeing parables of catastrophe—just in time for Earth Day, right? People have vanished, but the reactors keep on smoking. Brown's environmental awareness has something in common with lush paintings of Newtown Creek by Eva Struble or Joy Garnett's heated skies. Here, however, life insistently returns, if only to Jurassic Park. One could fault Brown for trying too hard to bring conceptual sophistication to tradition—or cuddly animals to a demanding public. Still, her paintings never lose their naturalism, their optimism, and their sense of humor.

4.20.08 — OBSESSIVE NATURE

Gustave Courbet has come to stand for Realism, a label he did not always accept. He gave the activities of plain people the scale of history painting. His muscular and unrelenting brush helped give landscape the same dignity and place in the history of art. If one had asked him for a label, he might have said only artist, and he would have meant it as a boast. He might not have minded, though, had one called him the first modern artist—and, he would insist, a great one.

There are as many first modern artists as there are definitions of modernity, and Courbet supplies quite a few all by himself. Cubism and contemporary art still confuse and anger people, but one can easily take modern art for granted. Most people take Impressionism as second nature. The Met has the virtue of making him strange again—as strange as his own obsessive personality. Its Courbet retrospective, through May 18, does not follow his career any too well, but it does trace a twisted trail from Romanticism to the new century. It gets one thinking about what happens when a painter takes desire seriously, and it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload.

Modernism had not yet littered art history with one movement after another, and this artist loved to stand alone. When he painted himself in his studio—flanked by friends and fantasies, poets and philosophers, dark shadows and plain folks—he asserted that the only art movement that mattered met in his head. He also leaves one unsure how long their meeting will last. The cast packs closely together, as in a Renaissance frieze or Courbet's own dark and stately Burial at Ornans, but each person broods alone. The artist's nude model has her feet on the ground, but her upper body entirely within the borders of the canvas and an apparent landscape.

As early as 1998, a gallery show in New York gave Courbet back his strangeness, and I have drawn material from a review then as well, in hopes of a fuller picture. The show brought together late work as fine as the portrait of Jo the Irish Girl combing her luxuriant red hair, from Kansas City. It imagined an isolated Romantic digging deeply into the earth, while the artist had gone into exile in Switzerland, and while French politics and art had largely forgotten him. Later the same gallery covered decades of landscapes still in private hands, before bankrupting itself through too much expensive real estate and too many promises.

Oddly enough, the Met's huge retrospective offers up the strangest version of Courbet yet. It can claim to supply balance and context. However, it cannot bring the large paintings that stopped French art in its tracks. The sober burial scene and the enigmatic Studio of the Artist cannot leave Paris, and Allied bombs destroyed his majestic Stonebreakers during World War II. It disrupts chronology in order to arrange his work by theme, and it comes late to his most famous subject, landscape. It pounds each motif into one's head, like the pounding of the surf in his seascapes or the violence of his streams.

Where obsessions turn up, sex cannot be far behind, and the Met includes his painting of a woman's crotch, almost as shocking now as to his contemporaries. It hangs in an art museum after all, near similar photographs, boxed as in a peep show. Family portraits, landscapes, animals after the hunt, and idyllic but odd-shaped young women alike become objects of desire. So does an ambitious scene of ghostly women in white that could represent preparations for either a wedding or a funeral. In the hunt, Courbet often omits the hunters, marking himself and the viewer as protagonists. He had to insist so much on realism, the Met suggests, in order to keep his own wild imaginings in check.

4.18.08 — RUSH HOUR

Someone may be watching this very minute, but how much does anyone really see? Sherry Karver and E. E. Smith, at Kim Foster through April 26, pursue passers-by in a relentless city—and the camera trained upon them. Before long, one starts to look at one artist through the eyes of the other. However, they assume a very different distance from their subjects.

Smith's "Street Watch" pursues one even outdoors. Her black-and-white photos do not always adopt a surveillance monitor's high vantage point, but they often do, and they have its way of isolating people from their surroundings. Subjects never engage the viewer and often turn their back on each other as well. They drift or loom like shadows against a shadowy background. The camera insists in advance on guilt, but it never gets close enough to frame an action or narrative, much less the lives within.

Karver has no trouble at all filling in the blanks. Does art offer a window onto the soul? Karver surrounds one instead with the babble of cell phones. She works from photographs of common spaces—a crosswalk, Grand Central Station, or a gallery with an image on the wall very much like her own. Then she alters and compresses detail as she paints, in oil glazes that heighten the color and the sheen. However, the glazes also add and conceal something more.

One may not notice the text right off in such a colorful crowd. Once one spots it, however, one cannot stop looking for more. It can sound banal, anxious, or comic. A man, "confused about his sexuality, can't decide if he is in the closet, if there really is a closet, too afraid to even open the doors of the closet." The hunt for each fragmentary biography or monologue becomes a game. Here in New York, neither loneliness nor absorption requires a night café or a half-empty theater.

Both artists recall the blurry photorealism of Gerhard Richter, spying on spies by Thomas Demand or Jane and Louise Wilson, self-absorbed gazers from Thomas Struth, or the compulsively staged actors of Jeff Wall. Neither is truly in that league, but both assert a more personal connection to strangers. In a recent performance, people suddenly froze in place in Grand Central Station. I looked again to see if Karver had staged something like that, but no. Yet that indoor space still embodies the ambiguity of public and private lives. Like her heavy lacquer, its familiar grandeur allows both distance and empathy.

Each artist's characters could easily the each other's spaces. One might mistake the grainy textures of Smith's oil prints for painting, Karver's glossy surfaces for photographs behind plastic. The first watches, although the camera artificially defines an event. The other overhears, although she plainly supplies the words. It becomes difficult to interpret either as a solemn commentary on executive and corporate spying. Too many spy cameras are in the hands of artists, and too many lives are slipping away.

4.16.08 — BASIC BLACK

This was a good year for basic black, especially one filament at a time. In some much overpraised paintings at Galerie Lelong through last weekend, Angelo Filomeno blended embroidery, Goth imagery, and a high surface sheen to present "Betrayed Witches." The black fabric could suit Yoko Ono, who opens in the same gallery this weekend. For yet another artist in black, however, darkness is only a starting point.

Spun thread lends itself to no end of obvious metaphors, and Tomas Saraceno manages to work more than his share into a single title, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spiders Web. Its very length suggests a tangle or an unfolding. After a few moments, but only after a few moments, visitors realize that they belong within the tangle, too. The invitation borders on mere crowd pleasing, but one has to make an effort to grasp it.

At Tanya Bonakdar through this weekend, black cords reach from the walls and floor to every side, without barring entrance to a large gallery. One can appreciate it as a mess or an almost tidy radial pattern, but one cannot quite step over or under it without touching. At its center, the lines organize themselves further into a kind of cocoon. This shape, too, looks undecided between chaos and regularity, but maybe nature is like that. One can take the longer cords as suspending the shape above ground, holding it down, or supplying its raw materials. One strains for a closer look.

One strains, that is, until it sinks in that more self-assured gallery-goers have come much closer already—but how? Is there a way into the maze? No, they just did what they had to do. The cords are really the thick, stretchable kind, and with a little push or pull one can fashion one's own route. Maybe someone figured out how to use them to launch into the opposite corner of the room, like a bungee jump. Maybe the cocoon got there the same way.

The cocoon holds out some hope of a self-organizing principle behind it all. It consists of roughly two unequal spheres—or maybe failed buckyballs—with another nested inside. Still, one cannot climb inside that, and it has no geometric relationship to the radial lines. When it comes down to it, a self-generating hierarchy is beside the point, and so are Saraceno's metaphors. This work does not bury itself deep inside one's head or bury the viewer inside. For better or worse, spiders and people alike can relax and have fun.

If one wants to appreciate darkness for its own sake and as part of nature, however, one might as well stick to two dimensions, with Jake Berthot at Betty Cunningham through May 10. I associate Berthot with dark, thickly textured abstract paintings, the reddish-brown all-over surface broken only by what may appear a second color field, a human shadow, or a thumbprint. Recently, he has made me more aware of the grounding in landscape, and here the sudden glimmers of yellow and white often describe a high horizon. They have the structure of a late Goya or Turner, but with an emphasis on perception rather than anxiety. I liked still more the works on paper, in a soft pencil that allows long, distinct line but also a grain near to charcoal. The bare trees grope for structure, like pines by Paul Cézanne.

4.14.08 — MARCH MADNESS

Earlier this month, I offered a guided tour of the madness of art fairs. Or rather I offered two tours of two kinds of madness. First, I stopped by at four of the nine fairs competing with the 2008 Armory Show, including Pulse, Scope, Volta NY, and LA Art. Second, the same article looked at charges of conflict of interest surrounding Volta's curatorial adviser. Barely a month before, Christian Viveros-Fauné had also freelanced as a critic for The Village Voice. Sometimes, however, enough is enough.

Together, the twin stories grew long and involved, and I have now separated them into two articles. Hence the two links just before. It means that your exhaustion at reading a single article can end with the exhaustion I faced at the fairs, while the shorter article can clarify how much more is at stake than journalism in conflict of interest in the arts. Perhaps a critic did go over the line, but he was making the same kind of decisions that others make as advocates for art, just as good museum curators have to be good educators, writers, and scholars. Money matters, and so does the commercial success of celebrity artists, but the real money trail leads elsewhere. Besides, Volta was not bad at all by the standards of a tawdry but revealing weekend.

Part of me hates to divide things up. For one thing, the whole idea of this site is not to separate theory and practice. I hate criticism as just a display of taste, whether as dismissal or puffery, and I want arguments to communicate. For another, I hate to give Tyler Green, the blogger who has already gained so much attention from the charges, still more publicity. Still, I hope the division makes my own case that more convincing. Ed Winkleman and others online have addressed the same issues sanely and succinctly, but I still get a little more space and a little more context.

Green was at it again, and again he got the details partly right and the picture dead wrong. That includes the picture of what an arts writer like himself should do. He noted that ArtNet, in the person of Charlie Finch, had reviewed paintings by Walter Robinson, who just happens to edit ArtNet. However, ArtNet is there to review exhibitions at such prominent galleries as Metro Pictures (through May 3). The Times would let readers down if it had a blackout on coverage of a Broadway musical, even if a staffer had written the book. It simply assigns reviews appropriately and takes note of any connections.

Actually the critic, Charlie Finch, did not identify Robinson's connections, but anyone who spends much time on ArtNet would know. He also liked the show, and I would just as soon see no one review it at all. Working in the 1980s, Robinson anticipated two of my least favorite trends in contemporary art. His dime-store novel images of sexuality have the knowing camp of Richard Prince, and his style has the celebrity lust of Elizabeth Peyton. Finch is entitled to his views about Robinson, however,, and he expressed them well. Besides, I can no longer assign Prince and Peyton sole blame for the decline of Western civilization.

Speaking of things not to review, I cannot review Maddy Rosenberg at Cheryl McGinnis, through May 10. Again her paintings and artist books, also recently at the Brooklyn Public Library, show how small work and fine detail can open out onto the world. Again, too, they show how real places, in Brooklyn and Europe, can feed the theater of the imagination. And again they suggest the hidden life of cities, in one instance wrapping around the gallery's pillared wall. However, if I have not convinced you after three reviews now, you will just have to go and convince yourself.

4.12.08 — LORD GRAYSTROKE

The Cold War did not do nuance, and Jasper Johns appropriated at least two of its symbols. His breakthrough came in 1954, when he began painting an American flag. He also began the 1960s by mapping the continental United States. I do not even count the overlaid numbers from 0 to 9, like the test patterns on early television—or a countdown to disaster.

Perhaps the Cold War could not accept shades of gray, but Johns has outlived all sorts of provocations and assumptions. Now through May 4, the Metropolitan Museum has the temerity to restrict an exhibition to his work in gray. Nor does the museum intend a quiet study alcove for a postscript to modern painting. "Jasper Johns: Gray" covers fifty years, starting soon after the young artist destroyed all that he had painted and started over. It is also the subject of my latest review, a longer article that has not previously appeared as a capsule on this page. Related past reviews have looked at Johns's Catenary series, his debt to Picasso, and the parallels to Robert Rauschenberg and his Combine paintings.