A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

If there’s a less polite exhibit than Paul McCarthy’s White Snow in New York presently, I certainly haven’t seen it.
Pretty much throughout his entire artistic career – certainly since I first saw him perform in England in 1983 – Mr McCarthy has trained his artistic focus on the more disgusting aspects of the human condition: [...]

 
 
 
I know it’s beyond a joke now, but having experienced “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” at the Met yesterday I now formally reinstate it as New York’s museum show of 2009. I admit I was thrilled by the Guggenheim’s “The Third Mind”, and because I enjoyed such a breadth of the work that it included, [...]

 
I knew that declaring my exhibition of the year as early as February would come back and bite me in the ass. It is only the fact that the twin shows, “Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings, and Happenings Films” and “Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room” are so much smaller than “The [...]

 
 
I have written here several times about how highly I rate the Guggenheim’s current show “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989”.  I have called it “Exhibition of the Year!” and celebrated its “trust in the chance gesture and the unconsidered act … which for someone of my sensibilities is an utter delight.” But [...]

 
I have been waiting for this book to arrive for some time: the wonderful and important new Errata Editions “Books on Books” version of what, in my undoubtedly biased opinion, is one of the greatest photography books ever published. Chris Killip’s In Flagrante was originally produced in London by Secker & Warburg in 1988. It [...]

I managed to set some kind of world record last March when I covered all eleven of the Armory Week fairs for ARTINFO. This time around things are rather more manageable, as only seven fairs have managed to navigate the choppy waters of the intervening year (or perhaps eight did, see below). No doubt everybody [...]

WOULD HAVE BEEN TAKEN FOR HEAVY SNOWFALL WERE IT NOT FOR SIMULTANEOUS APPEARANCE OF ODDLY-NAMED NEW WEBSITE … 

Many people reading these words will be aware that I have been tinkering with the beginnings of this crazy new venture for a little while now, but today is the day that I feel about ready to go [...]