Check out my profile of Massimiliano Gioni, the chief curator of the New Museum, and curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale, in ArtReview’s Power 100 issue.
(Which appears in the magazine with excellent portraits like the one above by Steven Brahms.)
The magazine also features features by Dave Hickey, Jerry Saltz, JJ Charlesworth, and Liam Gillick, among others. Check it out!
I recently spoke to celebrity stylist, Jennifer Hitzges (who has worked with basically everyone, including Beyonce), about how to wear fall fashion trends.
Inspired after our conversation, I went on the hunt for a pair of printed pants, only to discover that printed pants make a fat ass look like two basketballs in a duffel bag. Sigh. I’ll keep dreaming.
GUUURRLLS, I know you’ll be into this one, so click on if you want to read more.
“In the photograph that the Peter Blum gallery sent out to announce the opening of Esther Kläs’s exhibition Better Energy at MoMA PS1, three of the artist’s totemic sculptures – turquoise, charcoal and yellow, respectively – are depicted on a rooftop overlooking the skyline of Manhattan, as if paying homage to the city. Mistakenly thinking that this was an image of the installation, I was informed at the ticket counter that the PS1 rooftop is not open to the public.”
I quite liked aspects of Esther Kläs’s Better Energy at PS1 MoMA, which I reviewed for the September issue of ArtReview. She’s part of a group of young, female sculptors that are doing something related to the apotheosis of materials and their own bodies, that I can’t articulate into words because it’s probably not a valid theory. Kind of like Brancusi only with bitches. And I mean bitches in an empowering way.
Anyway, you can read the rest of the review here.
I did a Q+A with Neil Goldberg, a fellow Brown alum, for Art in America.
Unfortunately, his show at the Museum of the City of New York has already closed, but it’s a beautiful homage to the city, especially the East Village in the 1990s, by someone who calls himself a Buddhist-Lite. My favorite piece? Hallelujah Anyway. I’m so tired and burnt out today that I’m just going to quote myself on it (barf):
A similar feeling permeates Hallelujah Anyway Nos. 2 and 4 (1995–1996), a two-channel video installation that depicts, on one screen, shopkeepers open the gates to their stores on a strip of 1st Avenue in the East Village that has since been gentrified beyond recognition. On the other screen, elderly passengers laboriously board an M15 bus. Less a documentary than a choreographed dance of strained exuberance, the work shows a city always moving forward, offering up quotidian wonders for those who take the time to slow down and see them.
I’d wager a bet that the exhibition, “Stories The City Tells Itself,” will be back in some form in the future. In the meantime, look out for Neil’s work—especially those of you in LA. He’s just gone bi-coastal.
I’ve been picking up a lot more serious art review work these days, which is a big honor. It’s one thing to write online, and another thing entirely to write reviews for print magazines.
Given the weight of the honor, I approach the task of writing them much more seriously. I go see the show, and then read everything that’s been written on the artist. Then I give myself a night to think about it. Usually, I have dream in which I’m writing various opening sentences. Sometimes, I’ll wake myself up as early as 5:30am, jump up, and start writing them down.
Usually, however, I’ll sit for a few hours when I wake up, and take notes on blank pieces of white copy paper. As I get closer to writing the review, I spread them out before me, in a straight line, so that I have access to them as I’m writing. Before I hand in the review to an editor, I re-read every piece of paper—usually 10 or 20 pieces—and make sure that the ideas I wanted to touch upon are in the final review. In a 500 word piece, this requires a pretty well-oiled filter.
Sometimes, if the ideas I’m having are particularly complicated, or if I’m having trouble finding an access point on where to begin, I’ll go get a manicure, or write a blog post. I sign out of my email and Facebook, however, and don’t allow myself to look at them again until I’m done writing.
Right before I write the opening sentence, I pace around my apartment for a few minutes, letting my nervous energy build up. Then, I’ll sit down, and finish it rapidfire, unless I really don’t have any opinion on the work—increasingly rare, the better schooled I am in thinking critically—in which case writing it takes 9 or 10 hours, and drains me for weeks.
This is clearly a procrastination post. Now, I’ll sit down, outline my thoughts, and let all of the work I’ve done non-verbally spill out of me.
“Though County Down feels out of touch, it’s still fun to watch, especially if you’ve ever had one of those nights out with friends when, rolling on ecstasy, you marvel at how ‘connected’ you feel. The next morning, you wake up with a mega dry mouth, a shady dude in bed beside you and a sense of impending doom, but in the moment, you feel like the world is pretty wonderful. Some people never stop chasing the feeling, no matter how much it eludes them.”
—From my review of Laura Parnes’s County Down for ArtReview, which you can actually watch in its entirety here.
If you didn’t catch my ranting advice for graduates on this blog, you can check it out on Forbes.com today!
(Thanks to my friend Catey Hill, whose investment blog you should put on your reading list.)
Yesterday I interviewed Richard Phillips about his film collaboration with Lindsay Lohan, which is premiering at Art Basel next week. I really enjoyed our conversation, both because Phillips is really articulate, and because I love talking about Lindsay Lohan.
I like the new film better than the one above—the new one is this David Lynchian surfer homage—but both are fun to watch.
My Interview article on the mega-collector Dakis Joannou’s destefoundationcollection, currently installed in the windows of Barneys. You might not even know that you’ve already seen it.
(Above is a picture of me in front of the Athina Rachel Tsangari installation, without an umbrella, in the rain storm that overtook New York this morning.)
The second time I saw the exhibition of Andre Masson’s work at Blain Di Donna, I got up really close to the paintings, and stared at the brushstrokes. I almost never do that, but I should more often, because in examining them, Masson revealed a part of himself to me.
Read my piece about it for Art in America here. And go see the exhibition.
I wrote about a young artist, Ned Vena, a few weeks ago for Art In America, and have been thinking a lot about his paintings ever since. He’s really talented. The works in his current exhibition at Clifton Benevento almost feel Rothko-esque in their ability to provoke swooning.
The show is open until June 16, so go see it if you can. Word on the street is that Ned is about to get some major buzz, so you can say you saw it before anyone else.
Check out my review of Michael Mahalchick’s “It” at CANADA Gallery, which made me feel, kind of amazingly, like I had walked into Beetlejuice’s world.
Shannan and I did a story for Glo in which we asked a number of women we loved (and a few we didn’t know) to tell us what they didn’t know about their mothers until they became adults.
The stories and photographs that resulted from it are really touching. For me, a few were very personal—my aunt, for example, talked about my grandmother. Together, they are pictured above.
