Tag Archive "andy-warhol"

Letter From Paris: Occupy This

Pssst…Can we talk about money?  I keep on getting press releases from Phillips de Pury about all the wonderful things they’ve sold, the auction records they’ve broken – Richard Prince’s “Cowboys and Girlfriends” portfolio fetching $146,500; Andy Warhol’s “Grapes” topping $104,500 – and the next pot of gold waiting in the auction markets in New York and London.  And if it’s not from an auction house, the emails chime in from the art fairs in Abu Dhabi, Barcelona, Geneva or galleries in India, Hong Kong or some new white cube that just opened here in Paris.

Weekly Update – ICA’s focus on collaboration and Warhol

Collaboration is a road paved with landmines, and the way to avoid those is to stay focused on the goal. Luckily for the artists involved in the Institute of Contemporary Art’s “One is the Loneliest Number,” they have their eye on the prize. The exhibit features five collaborative teams, each comprised of two emerging artists who’ve been working together for four, six, even 10 years. Some of the work feels like the call and response of two individual voices, while other works sing with one voice. The show is haunting, as several pieces focus on isolation or miscommunication, shedding light ...

A Different Kind of Metaphor at Dia: Beacon, New York

The Dia: Beacon, 80 miles north of New York City, houses an impressive collection of pared down, phenomenological works from the past fifty years by Dan Flavin, Andy Warhol, Sol Lewitt, Imi Knoebel, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Robert Smithson, Fred Sanbeck, Joseph Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becker, William Heizer, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Serra, John Chamberlain, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Franz Erhard Walther, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Irwin, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, and (not on view currently) Blinky Palermo and George Trakas.

Two exhibition catalogs: ‘The Making of Art’ and ‘Painting Under Attack’

The Making of Art (Buchhandlung Walther Koenig: Cologne, 2009) ISBN 978-3-86560-586-3 Target Practice; Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (Seattle Art Museum, 2009) ISBN 978-0-932216-64-9 Those of us involved in the art world never seem to tire of looking critically at the way that world works. Self reflection has been the basis of a number of exhibitions in recent years;  I saw two devoted to artists’ studios: The Studio at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (discussed on Jan. 3, 2007) and Picturing the Studio at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009-10). The Making of Art, at the ...

The Afterlife of Things: Virgil Marti’s “Set Pieces” at the ICA at Penn

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) invited the artist, Virgil Marti, to create an exhibition from works in the store rooms of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), and Marti’s discoveries among the museum’s overflow, dis-attributed, unfashionable, and otherwise overlooked collections were a spur to his imagination. The objects in storage reminded Marti of the final scenes of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, with its panning shot of the endless, largely unopened crates of Kane’s accumulated treasures. In Set Pieces (at the ICA through Feb. 13, 2011), Marti gives previously-silent objects new lives in a sequence of tableaux sprung from his ...

‘Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture’; an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery

There are now two stories about Hide/Seek: the exhibition, and the controversy. This piece will cover the first; a second one will address the controversy. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, at the National Portrait Gallery, (NPG) , Smithsonian Institution through Feb. 13, 2011) is a serious examination of artistic conventions, particularly those of portraiture, as they concern a subject heretofore unspoken in the polite precincts of mainstream American museums. It addresses the manner, sometimes overt but often hidden, in which sexual difference has been manifest. The artists and their sitters include straight, gay, and the fluid range of ...

Weekly Update – Warhol’s celebrity photos

Andy Warhol loved to take pictures of people, especially celebrities. Warhol was a potent combination of socially awkward and a voyeur; he killed two birds with one stone by frequently taking refuge behind a camera lens in social situations, and his prodigious output shows it: At the time of his death in 1987, the pop artist had amassed more than 60,000 snapshots and Polaroids of his social circle and celebrities.

Poetry and art and the Catholic Church

At one time Andy Warhol seemed the pinnacle of mysterious fame and glamour — beyond comprehension. He certainly seemed that way to me — and I published interviews with him in three different magazines. But when Andy died fifteen years later, it turned out he was secretly a practicing Roman Catholic. I was surprised. So were people like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. I was raised Catholic. The Banal Catholic Church I call it; it’s as real as sparrows. Allen and William were not raised Catholic; now they thought they finally understood why they hated Andy.

Andy Warhol, the movie – the thingness of things

The last scene in Andy Warhol — the first documentary made about the artist after he died in February, 1987 —  is a close-up of Warhol talking while he’s having make-up applied by an assistant, presumably for a tv appearance although it’s not clear.   He’s having a conversation with someone off camera and he’s talking about make-up. Specifically, make-up that’s applied to dead bodies for a funeral.  As he talks, Warhol’s image begins to pixillate, growing more and more abstract as he says things like “Death can make you a star but if the make-up isn’t right, it’s all people ...

Late Warhol in Brooklyn

Brooklyn was too hot for galleries Wednesday. Only one elevator was operating where my son works in DUMBO; the others were shut down for brown-out prevention, under orders of Con-Ed. Given the extreme heat, Andy Warhol: The Last Decade at the Brooklyn Museum seemed like a good bet.