Distressed
November 09 2016 12:01 PM
Flag | Jasper Johns | Encaustic and printed paper collage on paper laid down on canvas | dated 'J. Johns 1960-'66'
Realigned: MEB | November 2016
Election Day 2016 #4
November 08 2016 02:43 PM
Flags 1 | Jasper Johns | Screenprint on J.B. Green paper | 1973 | National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection
Halloween Wow
October 31 2016 12:01 AM
Too Close For Comfort
July 13 2016 07:41 AM
Artists, writers and poets, musicians, actors (especially actors!), scientists, professional athletes, pretty much anyone and everyone we dub as ‘famous’: the less I know about you, the better. I don’t want or need to know anything about your personal life, no matter how colorful and/or fascinating and/or inspiring and/or deliciously sordid your life might be. All I care about is what you do, your work. You, as a person and as a thing, stand between me and what you do, your work. You are a distraction.
And yet I couldn’t stop myself from reading this piece on Chuck Close in The New York Times Magazine this morning. Everything I don’t like to read, don’t want to read, and don’t need to know. But I couldn’t stop reading. Snobby elitist sensationalist NYC art scene fact-gossip masquerading as journalism. Shame on me.
Some great photographs, though.
Photograph: Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times
BAMPFA, Old & New
February 04 2016 07:25 AM
After some thinking about it:
I wish the University of California had used some of the millions they spent on the new BAMPFA space for simultaneously retrofitting and rehabbing their former digs, Mario Ciampi's brutally beautiful building on Bancroft. The interior is a fiercely harsh and inhospitable environment, admittedly, especially for almost any sort of art you might immediately imagine, and the exterior is a challenge, but geez Louise just look at that thing! Come on! I'm the last one to argue for going out of your way to save many beloved old buildings, be it an Art Deco movie palace or a charming lighthouse or even a revered Frank Lloyd Wright (the Ennis-Brown House in Los Angeles, beautifully designed and shabbily constructed, has been crumbling from Day One and should just be put out its misery) but come on! Look at this thing!
Let them have their shiny new space at Center and Oxford but keep the grand old Soviet bunker on Bancroft, too. Make the space work. If you can't make sense of it, if you can't figure out what kind of art to display in it, you shouldn't be running a museum in the first place.
As for the new digs:
Shiny and modestly eccentric on the outside, sort of garagey on the inside. I'm still getting used to it. Check back with me in a couple of years, though I guarantee you I will never like it as much as the Ciampi.
