BLAKE GOPNIK on art

DAILY PIC: Cindy Sherman hit her stride as an artist amazingly...

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:16:40 -0400

DAILY PIC: Cindy Sherman hit her stride as an artist amazingly early. Her trademark self-portrait photos – including this hand-painted series where she mimics orgasm – had already started to appear while she was in her junior year in art at Buffalo State college. A new catalog, published by Vienna’s Verbund collection, presents everything Sherman made between 1975 and 1977, when she moved to New York and began work on her “Untitled Film Stills”. (A slide show in the Daily Beast presents a selection of works from the book.) One issue I’m still not clear on: Just how much of Sherman’s art depends on the influence of Suzy Lake, the pioneering Canadian feminist who was working with self-portrayal before Sherman was. Lake had published very Shermanesque work by early 1974, well before Sherman discovered herself as her subject. On the other hand, the new catalog explains that the two didn’t meet until Lake showed up to give a talk in Buffalo in October 1975, after Sherman’s first self-portraits. Sherman has always acknowledged the contact, so maybe the whole issue of precedence is a dead letter. After all, it was Sherman who took the idea and pushed it deep into our culture.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: L&M Arts, on New York’s Upper East Side, is...

Thu, 24 May 2012 23:50:32 -0400

DAILY PIC: L&M Arts, on New York’s Upper East Side, is showing a stunning selection of Frank Stella’s early, and massively influential, abstractions – including these copper-toned works. What impresses me most is how impossible it is to choose between reading Stella’s paintings for their perceptual effects (how they explore the beauty of lines and shapes and surfaces) and their conceptual rigor (how they follow simple rules dictated by the shape and size of Stella’s stretcher and brush). He’s the art historical hinge between sensual abstract expressionism and brainy minimal art – tendencies that normally exclude each other.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: We may be well past the turn of the century, but it...

Wed, 23 May 2012 17:09:16 -0400

DAILY PIC: We may be well past the turn of the century, but it still feels a fine moment for fin-de-siècle decadence – and so for the show called “A Rebours” that launches the new gallery Venus Over Manhattan, on New York’s Upper East Side. The show’s title copies the name of the great decadent novel published by Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1884, in which a fading aristocrat explores the far shores of aesthetic pleasure.

Adam Lindemann, the New York investor, author and collector who founded the new gallery, says that this first show is “broadly inspired” by Huysman’s project, and by the “decadence of the current art world.”

Two spiky candlesticks by the French artist César greet you as you come in, and help brighten a room otherwise lit only by spots. There’s a bizarre, overheated piece of neurasthenic medievalism painted by Gustave Moreau around 1885, and a painting from 2000 by the Englishman Glenn Brown: it could easily pass for the decaying portrait in Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Gray”.

For more details on the show see the longer version of this post at TheDailyBeast.com/Daily-Pic.

DAILY PIC: At Winkleman Gallery, the artist and former...

Tue, 22 May 2012 18:14:46 -0400

DAILY PIC: At Winkleman Gallery, the artist and former gallerist Barbara Broughel has organized a show called “Loughelton Revisited,” which gathers together work that was shown (or could have been shown) at her own Loughelton Gallery, once a highlight of the now-defunct East Village art scene. The works are from the 1980s, and include pieces by a number of now-famous names, including Richard Prince (under the pseudonym John Dogg), Polly Apfelbaum and John Baldessari – whose “Studio,” from 1988, is today’s Daily Pic. The strange thing about that piece, like nearly every object in the show, is that it looks like it could have been made yesterday – which argues either for Broughel’s farsighted vision as a dealer, or for the stagnation of artmaking today.

Maybe my favorite work in the show is Gary Bachman’s (unphotogenic) “One Pound Prop”, from 1986. It is a little house-of-cards cube whose four sides are lead plates, three inches by three, that each weigh one quarter pound. And of course the whole thing’s a knock-off and take-down of Richard Serra’s macho “One Ton Prop,” which was the same piece, made the same year, only chest-high and 2,000 times heavier. And here’s a nice detail: Bachman’s object exists in an edition of 2,000, so the total heft of his work matches Serra’s.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: Over the last few decades, the British sculptor Anish...

Mon, 21 May 2012 16:46:53 -0400

DAILY PIC: Over the last few decades, the British sculptor Anish Kapoor has made some of the most elegant, impressive sculpture there is: stones pierced with dabs of pure pigment; polished steel parabolas and “beans”. That elegance made some of us worry that his work was verging on slick. A new show at Gladstone Gallery in New York defeats such suspicions. The 24th street space is full of sloppy towers of concrete gloop – like the fossilized remnants of dinosaur diarrhea. The art’s still impressive and appealing, but it’s too strange to seem slick.

he Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: If one thing comes clear from looking at the Barnes...

Fri, 18 May 2012 17:16:22 -0400

DAILY PIC: If one thing comes clear from looking at the Barnes Foundation’s great collection of post-impressionist and early modernist art, which goes on view tomorrow in a new building in downtown Philadelphia – and which I reviewed in today’s Daily Beast – it’s that Paul Cézanne is its inescapable force. Picasso’s a genius, Matisse is great and Renoir has fabulous moments (if not in the mass of pink nudes at the Barnes). But Cézanne has a complexity that none of them match. And what’s most remarkable about his pictures is that, for all their fathomless depths, they don’t seem to need explaining: People of all stripes, with and without an art education, seem to be stopped cold by his work. (As I remember being, as a kid, coming across his apples for the first time.) Cézanne’s canvases put flesh on the otherwise abstract notion of a pure visual intelligence.

By that I don’t mean, as Barnes did, that Cézannes are about smartly configured shapes and compositions and colors; they are equally about the worlds they reveal, whether social or material or mythic. It’s just that their aboutness can’t be translated into non-visual terms. As I’ve argued before, even the best verbal account of Cézanne’s paintings – and especially his own words – will fall far short of the works’ visual reality. It’s still a phenomenon I just can’t explain. Maybe I should try painting it.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC (For May 17, posted one day late to Tumblr): We all...

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:13:00 -0400

DAILY PIC (For May 17, posted one day late to Tumblr): We all know that New York’s Lower East Side is where you go to hunt down the latest in art – maybe by tuned-in artists such as Austin Thomas. That assumption has been blown away by Thomas herself. In the latest incarnation of her Pocket Utopia space (an earlier one mattered on the Bushwick scene), Thomas is showing Old Master French engravings. She has got print expert Armin Kunz to bring in a 17th-century impression of Francis I of France, another of Louis XIV as a boy and any number of lavish, gorgeously pompous engravings showing notable artists of the Enlightenment. The pictures aren’t masterpieces or rare – many are cheaper than works by emerging artists – but they provide a winning contrast to the usual LES fare. They also feel weirdly of a piece with it.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

I’ve loved Richard Avedon’s photos almost as long as I can...

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:54:18 -0400

I’ve loved Richard Avedon’s photos almost as long as I can remember. (That love helped launch me on a short-lived career in commercial photography, for which I’m not sure if I thank him or blame him.) A show of Avedon’s group-portrait murals, at Gagosian in New York, reminds me of his magic. There’s always such a strong sense of a story behind the subjects he shows that his photos become almost animate. The story that most captures me, however, is the story of how each photo has come to be. Though they convey amazing spontaneity and decisive-monent-ish charm, it’s clear that these images are deeply artificial constructions. Each shoot must have been an insane photographic circus, with Avedon as the ruthless (and charming) ringleader. In this 1970 image, of Allen Ginsberg’s extended family of culturati, you can just imagine the emotional work it took to pull character out of each sitter, and to keep the whole crowd in line. And I think that, subliminally at least, the hidden story of the shoot is what helps sell us on the visible story of its subject. (Image is “Allen Ginsberg’s Family, Paterson, New Jersey, May 3, 1970,” by Richard Avedon, © The Richard Avedon Foundation)

For more inspiring photography, visit the new Tumblr put together by the photo teams at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, which launches today at picturedept.tumblr.com.

DAILY PIC: One of the most exciting trends in art today is the...

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:52:07 -0400

DAILY PIC: One of the most exciting trends in art today is the breakdown, at very long last, between established media and categories – between fine art and photography and craft, for instance. In an exhibition now at Show Room gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the New Yorker James Hyde, best known as a painter, has merged acrylics, ceramics and photography, all combined in single objects. It’s surprising how such a simple move – on view here in a piece called “On Over” – can still leave viewers usefully adrift. It’s as though we need to find new eyes for taking in Hyde’s painteramicography.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: In this week’s Newsweek – in the iPad and...

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:13:00 -0400

DAILY PIC: In this week’s Newsweek – in the iPad and International editions only – I write (and speak, on video) about Roy Lichtenstein’s career-spanning survey at the Art Institute of Chicago. I try to pull away from our usual concentration on the “fun” of his comic-book and pop-culture references, and emphasize his interest in the larger print culture that continues to condition us.

His “BenDay” dots are my crucial evidence.

Lichtenstein’s printer’s dots never help him render a real scene and its colors, as Benjamin Day, their 19th-century inventor, intended them to. They aren’t even true magnifications of the dot-field on a page in “Donald Duck” or “X-Men” – or, in this case, a nudie magazine. They float free of such specifics, as untethered symbols of a world derived from print. (Image is Lichtenstein’s “Nude with Street Scene”, from 1995 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, collection Simonyi)

Read a much longer version of this post at thedailybeast.com/daily-pic.

I’m just old enough to remember a brief-ish moment in the...

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:24:30 -0400

I’m just old enough to remember a brief-ish moment in the seventies when weavings, of one kind or another, seemed to be taking their place as serious contemporary art – and a lot of that was thanks to an art-trained weaver and sculptor named Sheila Hicks. She’s now getting her first show at the “serious” Sikkema Jenkins gallery in Chelsea, and it seems to signal a moment where the art world is ready to turn back to “craft” such as hers. Her giant hangings and textiles are fabulous things, but I’m particularly fond of her “Minimes”, such as the two shown here. Hicks travels with a tiny loom, the way other artists carry a sketchbook or point-and-shoot camera. The “Minimes” are her drawings, and have all the freshness and variety of improvised jottings.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: August Sander’s photographic...

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:29:23 -0400

DAILY PIC: August Sander’s photographic “inventory” of the German people in the first half of the last century is endlessly fascinating – as it proved, yet again, in a selection I saw at Edwynn Houk in New York. As I’ve written before, what interests me about the project isn’t its initial premise, but its obvious impossibility and guaranteed failure – a failure that must have been perfectly evident to Sander, as a sophisticated member of the lefty German art scene. An inventory of a people only reveals that a people cannot be inventoried. The whole thing can be read as a repudiation of the idea of national identity, rather than a sober exploration of it.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: Last night at Christie’s in New York, this...

Wed, 09 May 2012 18:23:50 -0400

DAILY PIC: Last night at Christie’s in New York, this painting by Mark Rothko – “Orange, Red, Yellow”, from 1961 – sold for $86,882,500, the auction record for an artwork made after the Second World War. As with last week’s auction-record sale of Edvard Munch’s “Scream”, for $119.9 million, the price may have less to do with the work’s earth-shaking importance or quality than with how easy it is to take in. If there’s one thing to say about almost any Rothko, it’s that it looks fine – and this one looks finer than most.

I’m not claiming that Rothko made over-the-sofa pictures, but “Orange, Red, Yellow” sure would go great with a couch. Whereas I’d like to imagine that the very, very greatest works of modern art – the ones that set the art-historical records, as it were – are so challenging, they might give a billionaire pause before bidding. Maybe the true gems in most sales are the works that fetch less than they ought to.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: Last year, I listed Tacita Dean as one of the 10 most...

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:34:48 -0400

DAILY PIC: Last year, I listed Tacita Dean as one of the 10 most important artists working today. Had I ranked my choices, she would have stood toward the top. Her contemplative films (never videos) unpack the world the way Cezanne and Chardin do. On Sunday, the New Museum in New York opened a show of her cinematic portraits, in which she takes lingering looks at Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, Julie Mehretu and (at especially great length) the choreographer Merce Cunningham. I talked to Dean about these works in Monday’s Daily Beast, and you can click on the still on this page for footage that gives a tiny taste of the Cunningham piece – it’s literally 1/100th of the total. (Photo and footage by Lucy Hogg.)

DAILY PIC: For the last couple of years, I’ve been...

Mon, 07 May 2012 15:07:39 -0400

DAILY PIC: For the last couple of years, I’ve been looking at the mediocre art of the actor James Franco, and thinking there might be an element of brilliance in it. He provides such a generic, superficial version of contemporary art that it’s like what a genius set decorator might supply for a Hollywood movie about the Chelsea scene. Could it be that Franco’s entire art career has in fact been about him giving a brilliant theatrical performance as a generic contemporary artist – sort of like the one he played so well on General Hospital?

Franco’s appearance last night for a 20-minute book talk at PS1, the MoMA affiliate, made me have significant doubts. Klaus Biesenbach, PS1’s director, lobbed softball questions that, as he himself admitted, are what you toss out when you can’t think of anything else: What Web sites do you visit? What did you do after school when you were 14? And Franco struck out on every one, yielding zero insight into why he makes art, or why we should care. He came across as what he may just be: A self-regarding Hollywood starlet who thinks that a career as an artist, however part-time, will somehow yield cultural status. When the audience started tossing out some tougher questions, Franco beat a panicked retreat.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: My favorite piece at the first New York edition of...

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:12:19 -0400

DAILY PIC: My favorite piece at the first New York edition of London’s Frieze art fair, which previewed yesterday in a gargantuan tent on Randall’s Island, was this simple amusement-park booth out by the entrance. An artist named Joel Kyack was giving passersby a choice between a free game of ring-toss (onto the funnel of a toy ship) and of roll-the-ball (into a hole barely big enough to let it in). It was good, simple fun, with not a cent at stake or any grand ambitions possible.

And then you headed into Frieze.

The thing about fairs that almost no one outside the art world recognizes is that you’ll almost never find an insider who actually gets pleasure from the damn things. As one dealer put it, “The only thing that’s good about [Frieze] is that the light is even.” He counts other fairs, where it isn’t, as even worse.

We’d picket any museum that presented such an endless spread of ill-digested art, with so little rhyme or reason to its presentation and such giant lapses in quality. I found my eyes glazing over and my mind going numb, just at the sight of it all.

For a much longer version of this post go to TheDailyBeast.com/Daily-Pic.

DAILY PIC: The problem with staring at an old chestnut like...

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:08:43 -0400

DAILY PIC: The problem with staring at an old chestnut like “The Scream” – since last night, the auction world’s record holder – is that it takes too much work to think or feel anything fresh. (I wrote about my final encounter with the Munch in today’s Daily Beast.) That’s why, at the same Sotheby’s preview where “The Scream” was on view, I got way more pleasure from doping out this utterly obscure abstraction painted in 1914 by the absolutely unknown Belgian futurist named Jules Schmalzigaug. He seems to have been in almost on the ground floor of modernism, but somehow he fell through its cracks. Schmalzigaug committed suicide in 1917, when he was only 34, but instead of that tabloid death launching him to fame, it cast him into oblivion. One more thing: Schmalzigaug’s piece is on sale in today’s afternoon sale, with a high estimate of only $350,000, so there’s still a chance to nab it before his stock rises. (And I’m not even asking for a cut.)

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: Last night, at the opening of a group show at Hauser...

Wed, 02 May 2012 17:53:00 -0400

DAILY PIC: Last night, at the opening of a group show at Hauser & Wirth gallery on New York’s Upper East Side, I came across something I rarely see: A successful new riff on Duchamp. A young Brooklyn artist named Marc Ganzglass was showing a recent piece called “Turenne Railing”. It counts as a readymade, of sorts, because like Duchamp’s famous urinal it transplants a functional object into the art world. In this case, however, Ganzglass took a 17th-century forged-iron railing he’d photographed in Paris, and remade it himself, by hand, to include in this show. (Ganzglass is 39 and relatively slight, and doesn’t look like the trained blacksmith he is. He’s also way smarter and more verbal than your comic-strip hammer-head.) I think of this piece as a new Duchampian sub-species you might call a “hand-made readymade”. Instead of being about inserting the industrial into the old-fashioned world of hand-crafted art, it inserts old-fashioned craft and hard labor into today’s industrialized art scene. But then, in talking with Ganzglass (and talking, and talking) I realized that Duchamp was sometimes up to something similar, as when he had his own urinal hand-copied in the 1960s. Duchamp’s work is never the one-liner it’s made out to be, and Ganzglass adds new lines of his own.

Matthew Day Jackson, the talented young artist who curated the show, says in his statement that art has to be “destroyed and rebuilt without referring to an operating manual.” I’m not sure that’s right. I think that, like Ganzglass, you mostly rewrite the old one. (Photo by Lucy Hogg)

DAILY PIC: At their best, the great London art duo Gilbert and...

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:07:31 -0400

DAILY PIC: At their best, the great London art duo Gilbert and George have a note of poignancy in their work – very notable in early pieces from the 1960s, less so as they’ve become superstars. That note is back again, in complicated ways, in a giant new series of works called the London Pictures, filling both of Lehmann Maupin’s New York spaces, as well as all Sonnabend Gallery. The premise behind the project is simple: Over the last six years or so, G&G have collected 3,712 daily posters from British newspaper boxes, and have now organized them in grids according to the words they contain. Thirty-five headlines including the word “Police” might appear in frames on one wall; fifteen “Stabbed To Deaths” might be on another. The poignancy? It doesn’t just lie in the banal violence of the urban subject matter. It’s also in the fact that the entire genre of headlines the duo have captured is sure to disappear, one of these decades. Google demands headlines that are more informative than grabby. (Photo by Christopher Burke Studios, courtesy the artists and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York)The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

Daily Pic: In the latest billboard project at the High Line park...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:08:00 -0400

Daily Pic: In the latest billboard project at the High Line park in New York, British artist David Shrigley gets at how many of us feel, most of the time, and acts as though it’s something we can share with others. (Click on the image to read its text.) Shrigley always walks a fine line between the smart and the twee, but stays on the right side when he goes grim. I’ve been going by this billboard almost daily for the best part of a month, and it still makes me laugh, and groan. Too bad there’s no Prozac cart on the High Line.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.