Cao Fei’s "Whose Utopia"

July 22, 2011 Among contemporary world artists, the Guangdong new media and video artist Cao Fei is among the most intriguing explorers of the boundaries between the fantastical, the global/political and the everyday. Her recent work "Whose Utopia" unquestionably steals the show at the new Deutsche Guggenheim exhibit "Fantastic Narratives in Contemporary Video," in Berlin. "Whose Utopia" is an elegant triptych, or else a concerto for factory in three movem.. read more...

Painting with James Hyde and a Weekend at Mount Tremper Arts

July 21, 2011 Why painting?  Or, what is it exactly about the act of lathering, or perhaps even feathering or spilling, paint upon a surface that has intrigued artists, critics, thinkers, and aesthetes alike for thousands of years?  And whatever that origin may be, does it grip us in the same way today, in our post-Duchampian era of post-post-modernism, as it did 100+ years ago?  The answer, seemingly, is yes.  That is, according to New York artist James Hyde.   I.. read more...

An Interesting Critique of John Cage

July 17, 2011 "Music is sound. Some sounds may be music. Silence is the medium in which sounds and music are expressed. Spare me the next crackpot offering of themes and variations on silence. The deaf have ways of understanding sound and appreciating music. Tell me how you would convey the artisitic merit of silence to the deaf??" -Justinae, reader/contributor to the London Telegraph. How indeed could the deaf be made to appreciate "4'33?" A new problem for Cage .. read more...

With A Lunatic Gesture We Forsook Jujistsu (Automatism A)

July 15, 2011 With a lunatic gesture we forsook jujitsu. Etwas unterscheiden zwischen werden Erde gesehen. The politics of underwriting that I have reclaimed, forsooth my shakespearean liege, a league embedded in the first strategy when I set out for champions, however it may have otherwise seemed. When the natives that combined their energies first of all eschewed gentrification, exclaimed that howeverso things might have first seemed to them symbolically, they would absolutely and hirsut.. read more...

Secrets of 20th Century Music

July 15, 2011

 

"One of the things that people don’t realize about Dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful."

Spike Jonze Jr., as quoted by Thomas Pynchon

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And The Nominees for Le Prix Marcel Duchamp 2011 Are…

July 15, 2011 Each year, one French artist is awarded the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp. It does not garner quite the media buzz as the Turner Prize does, but the nominees do get a chance to exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art of Lille for two months, and the winner will have his or her own exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou as well as €35,000 in the bank. This year’s nominees include four impressive artists from very different backgrounds. Damien Caba.. read more...

Stephen Colbert Suggests Gitmo Might Be Conceptual Art

July 15, 2011 July 14th, 2011: Stephen Colbert proves yet again the edginess of his political satire, making his audience audibly uncomfortable with this strangely avant-garde speculation:   "It now occurs to me, could all of Gitmo, in fact be one giant art installation? Take our enemies from the stone-age villages in Afghanistan, fly them half way across the world and drop them into an extra-governmental, intra-liminal space, neither America nor the battlefield, here-in using .. read more...

How To Take A Duchamp Road Trip

July 15, 2011 Step 1: Drive to the Philadelphia Art Museum, see the Large Glass and peek like a pervert through the wooden wall at "Entant Donnes." Chuckle at puns like "Fresh Widow." Step 2: Drive around the rest of the country, looking at waterfalls, landscapes, women, bachelors, machines, and windows. Let the memory of the incredible vividness of Duchamp's world subsume all later perceptions, which appear as pale shadows by comparison. Pull up to the Hudson and brea.. read more...

Arthur C. Danto: on Hegel and Duchamp

July 14, 2011 Arthur C. Danto's conceptions of "the end of art" and "posthistoricism" were quickly adopted as catch-phrases and widely misunderstood by the art world of the eighties and nineties.  He did not mean, however, that art could no longer be made, accomplished, nor that any criteria for its judgment was to be doomed--deemed historical.  Here, Danto illuminates his complex philosophy--of which art was always and ever the object: "...and it is the.. read more...