Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:55:52 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Daniel Kunitz :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Daniel+Kunitz istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/painting-pushes-its-limits/83816/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST "Painting: Now and Forever, Part II," a group show occupying both the Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali galleries, refers back to a survey of contemporary painting (Part I) held a decade ago at Marks and the now defunct Pat Hearn Gallery. At the time, when painting was considerably more embattled and the market for it much smaller, the show's title rang defiant; today, it sounds ironic. Part II explores a medium — or approach, since the paint is often absent here — in a state of productive... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/wiley-conquers-the-world-stage/83425/ Fri, 8 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST When Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) began exhibiting his portraits of young African-American males some five years ago, they hit a cultural sweet spot, bringing a hip-hop swagger into the gallery, and propelling the Yale-trained artist to international renown. But these large oils were not just photo-realist pictures of black men in hoodies and baggy jeans: They had a sophisticated conceptual underpinning, which only further endeared them to critics and collectors. Mr. Wiley had asked his models to... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-twins-of-the-rec-room-os-gemeos/83323/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Os Gemeos — "the twins," in Portuguese — is the nom de plume of the twin Brazilian artists Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo (b. 1974) of São Paulo, Brazil. Their work borrows the idioms of outsider and folk art in a style heavily influenced by the one-time graffiti artist Barry McGee. And though, like Mr. McGee, they might once have been artists of the street, their gallery-sized installation at Deitch Projects, "Too Far Too Close," suggests they have since become artists of the rec room. The show... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/retrospective-been-there-sold-that/81190/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST 'Retrospective," a group show at Gagosian's 21st Street gallery, is like a summer concert festival with some very promising, big-name acts. Its organizing principle, the ways a major artist looks back and reassesses his — unfortunately, in this case, only his — career, also strikes a promising note. Too bad, then, that so many of these guys showed up out of shape, like Vegas has-beens listlessly running through medleys of their greatest hits. For the opening act, Gagosian wheels out the... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/three-artists-do-it-themselves/80757/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST One corporate-style production-line aesthetics inaugurated by Andy Warhol (and celebrated by artists from Damien Hirst to Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons) has been the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) reaction to it. Although the term is loosely defined, DIY artists emphasize the personal and the handmade; draw inspiration from the world of craftsmanship, and tend to rely on "weak" materials such as fabric and paper. "Personal Protocols and Other Preferences," a challenging and innovative exhibition... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-national-academy-museums-grab-bag-anthology/79335/ Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST With the work of 130 artists on display, "The 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art" at the National Academy Museum is a bit of a grab bag. As compared with previous Annuals, this one proves a strong anthology, a pleasantly scented bouquet. But its relative vigor does nothing to mitigate the strangeness of walking among its multitudinous offerings. For, like cats at a dog show, the best work here preens awkwardly among the uninspired, the hokey, the retrograde... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-commitment-to-color/76864/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The foundation myth of Color Field painting goes something like this: In 1953, two Washington, D.C.-based artists, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, paid a visit to the New York studio of Helen Frankenthaler, where they saw a work in which highly diluted oils soaking into the weave of unprimed canvas had caused a beautiful stain effect. Ms. Frankenthaler called the work "Mountains and Sea," and she had painted it the year before, when she was just 24. Louis later described it as "the bridge... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/robert-rauschenberg-1925-2008/76352/ Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 EST I remember well the first time I saw Robert Rauschenberg, who died yesterday at age 82. It was at a Whitney Museum opening in the early 1990s, and the artist, whom I did not meet, stood in the galleries with a generous smile and a drink in his hand. As a curator informed me that Rauschenberg was the only person allowed into the galleries with a drink, the artist promptly dropped it, breaking the glass and spilling its contents across the floor. Rauschenberg was always an anarchic... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/amy-bessones-artificial-appeal/76165/ Fri, 9 May 2008 02:39:07 EST Amy Bessone paints figurines as if they were human beings. This might seem a simple and potentially static approach, yet the 12 large oils in the Los Angeles-based artist's first New York solo show, "With Friends Like These ... ," which is spread across Salon 94's uptown and downtown spaces, tremble with ideas, if not exactly with vitality. The sexier and more intellectually provocative of the two sets hangs uptown, where one finds four complex takes on the female nude. "Bluebird" (2008), for... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/double-album-at-the-new-museum/75653/ Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Walter Pater asserted in the 19th century that all art constantly aspires to the condition of music. Today's contemporary artists, however, seem mainly to aspire to talk about music — in the sentimental tones of a classic-rock DJ. "Double Album," a two-artist exhibition at the New Museum, pairs the first American surveys of the Mexican-born Daniel Guzmán (b. 1964) and Canadian Steven Shearer (b. 1968), both of whom, like so many artists working now, wallow in the cultures of rock and pop music... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-brilliant-color/74948/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) tends to focus on the simplest things, the most elemental phenomena. Wander through his room-size installations and you'll find yourself largely alone with light: There is little to "look at" in his work, yet much to absorb. Perhaps that's why his extensive, dual-venue exhibition — at both the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 — his first comprehensive show in America, is called "Take your time." One would do well to heed the advice. The numerous... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/words-of-wisdom-and-wit/74492/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST The criteria shaping "Lots of Things Like This," a new exhibition at apexart curated by the author Dave Eggers, are as simple and deadpan as its title. Mr. Eggers sought work containing an image, some words, and a sense of humor — work that, for the most part, falls on a continuum between comics and graffiti. He has unearthed more than 100 examples by artists both notable and nearly anonymous, as well as some by a number of people not generally known as visual artists at all. His gleanings... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/onscreen-angst-straight-from-the-60s/74109/ Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST With "Because of Him," their new exhibition at Cheim & Read, the collaborative duo McDermott & McGough have finally arrived in the 1960s. About a quarter-century ago, David McDermott (b. 1952) and Peter McGough (b. 1958) became known for living, dressing, and making artwork as if they were Victorian gentlemen. It was a strange effort, which nonetheless captured the torporific nostalgia high of fin-de-siècle America — the hangover from which we've still not recovered — and landed them in two... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/figure-and-ground/73280/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The British artist Katy Moran (b. 1975) employs a palette out of Turner, brushstrokes borrowed from de Kooning, and the press release of a lesser Gerhard Richter or some other conceptual painter. Yet without supplemental information, a visitor to her first solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery would likely assume the small paintings on view were merely gestural abstractions. Take, for instance, "Nature Boy" (2007), in which broad looping strokes of turquoise, brown, and black cavort with thin... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-keeping-with-warhol/73316/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST When it opened in 1980 at the Jewish Museum — after first showing at a Jewish community center in Rockville, Md., and at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami — Andy Warhol's exhibition "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" aroused some controversy. The Jewish Museum's new exhibition, a reprise of sorts called "Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered," is unlikely to incite similar debate. The series forming the core of each show consists of paintings and prints of people... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/rainbow-coalition/72403/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:33:58 EST "Color Chart," a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is an exhibition so simple and right in its conception that one marvels at the fact that it hasn't been done before. The show gathers work by 44 artists who have responded to the commercial color chart. And for most of these artists, using the color chart has meant treating color as a ready-made, something found rather than something expressing emotion. Given that Marcel Duchamp invented the notion of the ready-made, it makes sense... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-makes-a-museum/71585/ Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST The final phase of the New Museum's inaugural exhibition, "Unmonumental," is largely devoted to work that challenges the traditional definition of what constitutes a museum. "The Sound of Things: Unmonumental Audio" is devoted to sound art and has no visual component, while "Montage: Unmonumental Online" brings together works of Internet-based art, which require no museum at all. The institution has also recently added a more conventional video installation, titled "The Golden Age" (2007), by... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/john-chamberlains-heavy-metal/71604/ Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST The five large pieces in his new show at PaceWildenstein Gallery suggest that the sculptor John Chamberlain (b. 1927), now in his 81st year, has lost none of the playfulness and verve that have long characterized his efforts. And yet his methods continue to change. Best-known for polychrome sculptures constructed from crushed automobile parts, he has, in fact, worked in many media, from steel pipes to foam, foil, paper bags, and Plexiglas. The stainless steel from which the five new pieces have... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/dislocating-dreams/70863/ Thu, 7 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Luis Gispert (b. 1972) is a Miami-based artist whose considerable talents have earned him a show, called "El Mundo Es Tuyo (The World Is Yours)," that occupies two prestigious galleries. "Smother," a 26-minute film, plays on a vast wall in Mary Boone's Chelsea gallery, while related photographs and sculptures occupy Zach Feuer's gallery across the street. This two-gallery scheme, however, spreads Mr. Gispert's talents a bit too thin. The show turns on the axis of the disturbing and... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/before-the-buildings/69309/ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Architectural drawings and models do not easily inhabit gallery spaces. The reach of three dimensions and the impact of size seem so crucial to creating the drama of architecture that buildings in miniature or on paper tend to fall flat. Further, architecture is about interaction: between people and space, people and edifices, and also, in the design process, which demands collaboration between architects and patrons, between people and other people. No such intercourse occurs in the gallery... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/straight-off-the-streets/68628/ Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Stenciled on a swathe of fake white bricks, which is hung in a tidy frame, are the words "Lying to the police is never wrong." This cheesy effect of cheaply packaged protest happens to be a product of the world's most famous graffiti artist, Banksy, though it brings to mind a trinket you'd find in a tourist vendor's cart by London's Millennium Bridge, next to the anarchy buttons and postcards of punks. An anonymous Brit (or so legend has it), Banksy is currently the subject of a show at Vanina... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/automatic-for-the-people/68388/ Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST "You are the product of television. You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer." So says "Television Delivers People," a video made in 1975 by Richard Serra, which also gives its name to a new show at the Whitney that traces video art's engagement with television from the 1970s to the present day, when the Internet now allows people to deliver television. Its promising aim is to follow the media critique of modernity's favorite medium over the last 30 years. In practice, the nine... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/group-of-one-liners/66485/ Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Francesco Vezzoli's "Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!" (2006) spoofs the sort of celebrity biography — the kind that typically appears on "E! True Hollywood Story" — many people try to avoid when channel surfing. In Mr. Vezzoli's film, it is the artist who becomes the subject of this "exposé." Over the course of 15 hilarious minutes — through "re-enactments" and interviews with gay porn stars, hustlers, actors, and others, including an actress playing Anni Albers (deceased wife of the... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/capturing-the-discordant/66135/ Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Among the first works one encounters in "Atair," the new show at Andrea Rosen Gallery by the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968), is a large C-print depicting a newspaper's front page, below the fold. An article about the "dark side of gold" appears next to an ad for the jeweler Bulgari; beyond that pairing, it's difficult to see what attracted him to the page. And yet, the page's sheer size heightens the presence of the newspaper, the sense of it as an object — and it is strangely... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/not-quite-watching-paint-dry/65442/ Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST At one point in the new biopic "Klimt," a pompous critic explains his aesthetic theory to a group of friends at a Vienna coffeehouse by pointing to a gilt-framed mirror: because it is functional, the mirrored surface is beautiful, he says, but the frame is ugly because it is merely ornamental. At this the painter Gustav Klimt, played by John Malkovich, rises and stuffs a slice of cake into the critic's face. He explains that the cake has allowed him to shut up the critic, thus it is functional... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/partners-in-time/64912/ Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST "Black, White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe," a new documentary about the late curator Sam Wagstaff, calls him "totally forgotten." This epithet is not entirely accurate, though if he is remembered today, it is too often solely for being the longtime partner of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. But Wagstaff didn't just cleave to a photographer; he was a lover of photography. Indeed, he became one of the most important and perspicacious collectors of photography... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/collectors-fantasy-on-display/64804/ Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST "The Incomplete," a huge exhibition filling all three floors of the Chelsea Art Museum, consists of work entirely from a private collection, that of Hubert Neumann — an awkward, though not unprecedented, arrangement. Still, it affords one the chance to assess the taste of a well-known and highly regarded collector, who in this case also serves as the exhibition's co-curator. The show begins with work from the early 1980s, though it is heavily weighted toward paintings from the last decade. Why... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/compassion-or-condemnation/64377/ Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST On one wall of Raymond Pettibon's new show at David Zwirner Gallery are the words "Israel Is Moral," painted in light blue, with a caret inserting the letter "t" between the "r" and "a" of the final word, so that it also reads as "Mortal." An expression of compassion or one of condemnation? You might think you know the answer; you might think you know what he's really getting at. But to the extent that this is an art installation and not just a piece of political sloganeering, the only... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/prince-spiritual-america/63502/ Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST When the expertly organized and relentlessly needling Richard Prince retrospective opens tomorrow at the Guggenheim Museum, one hopes it won't so completely delight the art world that it fails to confound them, or confound most uninitiated visitors when it also ought to delight them. The title, "Spiritual America," was aptly lifted from one of the artist's early, and more notorious, works, a photograph of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields, naked and oiled like a porn star, taken by Gary Gross in... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/shapes-of-time/63048/ Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST 'Without Time—Without Body—Without Place," Wolfgang Laib's (b. 1950) first solo outing at Sean Kelly Gallery, achieves the spareness implied by its title while still flounting its content. Perhaps the repetitions of the title refer to the fact that this German artist tends to work in series, which have not changed dramatically over the years. The eponymous centerpiece consists of an expansive, garage-size grid of "rice mountains" —small, conical mounds of rice placed on the floor — which is... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/interactive-but-not-engaging/62041/ Thu, 6 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST The common assumption is that people want to "interact" — with their newspapers and televisions, with science or history museum displays, with politicians during a debate, and with art — is all too rarely questioned. "25 Years Later: Welcome to Art In General," an exhibition in the UBS Art Gallery, consists of 10 works all requiring some degree of audience interaction. The accompanying booklet, with its three explanatory essays, never asks — or answers — why an artist might want to make... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/weaving-dreams-of-mom-and-dad/61611/ Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST "Love and Loss," a trilogy of videos by Neil Goldberg, currently at the Jewish Museum, constitutes, in a sense, several chapters of autobiography, spoken in the third person. Or persons, as the characters in these pieces — which require only 17 minutes of total viewing time — are Goldberg's parents. The videos proceed with lulling simplicity. Indeed, the three works employ such a meager repertoire of means that one doubts that any one of them, seen alone, would make much of an impact. As a... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/putting-a-name-to-a-face/61136/ Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST "Intrigued But Resistant" — those were the words that flashed above my face on the wallsize screen when I first entered the room housing "Taken," one of two video installations that comprise the show "Profiling" at the Whitney Museum. Ah, yes: For once I'd been labeled accurately. Who wouldn't be intrigued by an exhibition dedicated to visual profiling through surveillance? It is, admittedly, an especially timely subject, but then again, surveillance as a format for video art is not... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/step-1-buy-paint-step-2/58266/ Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Once upon a time, we knew what painting was. As recently as the 1960s, there was, if not a single consensus, then at least several broad and overlapping consensuses about what constituted a painting: It was two-dimensional and used pigments on some type of support, like a canvas; it was abstract, or it was representational; it was defined by its medium and sought to exclude the influence of all others, or it was defined by how prettily or truthfully it employed its medium, etc. The delightful... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-artists-turn-to-film/57966/ Fri, 6 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Matthew Barney's grandiose, five-film extravaganza "The Cremaster Cycle" (1995–2003) established his role as myth-making wizard of the art-world Oz. Now three of his short films, on view for one week beginning today at the IFC Center, offer a uniquely concise résumé of the artist's development, as well as a peek into what he's been doing since his 2003 Guggenheim Museum retrospective. Many in the world of performance art claim Mr. Barney for themselves, and one of the films on view at IFC... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/enough-at-the-table-for-all/57535/ Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST On Sunday, no fewer than 12 exhibitions opened at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. "We have a big building," one staffer chuckled when I noted the superabundance of shows. Indeed they have filled every inch, down to the basement boiler room. Of course, with so much art, just about everyone will find something to kick against. But, taken as a whole, it is one of the better seasonal installations this institution has assembled in some time. As for general themes and trends, one might point out a... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/wicked-ventriloquist/56563/ Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST In America — where, as Wallace Stevens once wrote, "money is a kind of poetry" — it makes sense that advertising might be seen as a kind of art. From Gerald Murphy and Charles Sheeler to Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, our artists have imitated and drawn inspiration from advertising graphics. Similarly, advertisements often copy the look of such graphic-art pioneers as the Constructivists. Matthew Brannon, a young New York artist, uses the look of promotional graphic design and the... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/thinking-inside-the-frame/54694/ Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:00 EST By merely framing a patch of the world, a photograph invites us to see what is easily passed over. Such is the modest notion proposed by "Hidden in Plain Sight," a tightly organized exhibition of about 35 images from the Metropolitan Museum's collection, which opened Tuesday and remains on view all summer. Although it explores the poetics of the ordinary, the show has the notable virtue of not ranging too far afield. Rather than corralling as many pertinent images by as many photographers as... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/with-her-back-to-the-turmoil/52802/ Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST "Classicists are people who look out with their backs to the world," the painter Agnes Martin once wrote in a prose poem. Later she added, "You stand with your back to the turmoil." These words come from a trenchant essay by Lynne Cooke accompanying "Homage to [a] Life, Agnes Martin's Paintings, 1990–2004," the fifth and final installment of what has been an ongoing presentation of the artist's work at Dia: Beacon. Was Martin (1912–2004), the austere and generally unacknowledged master of late... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/wide-awake/51889/ Thu, 5 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Zen Buddhism is not merely emptiness, "no mind," and koans. Among other things, it maintains a robust tradition of figure painting, a tradition magnificently celebrated by "Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan," a new exhibition at the Japan Society. The show comprises 47 Japanese (Zen) and Chinese (Chan) scroll paintings and painted sliding doors, including some work that has never before left Japan. Scroll paintings of the Zen pantheon — the Buddha Sakyamuni (the historical... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/blossoms-bubbles-beauty/51409/ Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Neither abstraction nor the influence of comic strips and cartoons on fine art has lacked commentary. But even now, when humor pervades contemporary visual arts, the two are rarely contained within the same thought bubble. "Comic Abstraction," a curious exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is a bubble meant to contain these unwieldy notions. It corrals 13 artists who harness comic strips, cartoons, and the look of animation to make abstract art. And not just abstract art but also art that... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/sprawling-riotous-argument/50939/ Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST What electric, various, and searching art women have been making over the past 17 years. I don't know what "Global Feminisms" will tell you about feminist thought around the world, but this sprawling and magnificently in-your-face exhibition will certainly clue you in to the range and power of art made by women since 1990. Organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, to inaugurate the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the show also coincides with the 30th... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/goulash-by-committee/50533/ Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST The "Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts" at the American Academy of Arts and Letters is a goulash in which some ingredients seem fresher than others. Bringing together the work of 34 contemporary artists, chosen by the 109-year-old institution's Art Awards and Purchase Committee, the show offers a sense of art's current diversity. But it also demonstrates some of the challenges associated with selecting art by committee. If the exhibition represents a stew of styles and approaches, it also... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/time-to-spare/50088/ Thu, 8 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST The seminal artistic problem of the last half century has been how to represent time. Attempts to solve that problem have altered and expanded our aesthetic universe. Two new exhibits, each culled from the permanent collections of their respective institutions, take the temporal as their measure. The Metropolitan Museum has shown individual works of video art before. Still, there will be those who feel "Closed Circuit," its first multi-artist exhibition of video and new media, is somehow an... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/portraits-of-the-artists-young-old/48754/ Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST There is something prurient about wanting to see images of artists, especially artists in their studios. They tease us, offering a glimpse of someone's routine, a glimpse that is meant to stand in for an entire life. They seduce us with the promise of access to the bared existence of these supposedly interesting people. And we look because, like tabloid magazine readers, we want to be manipulated — in this case into believing first that these pictures offer up the "truth" about a given artist... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/turning-confinement-into-beauty/47830/ Thu, 1 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST The work of "outsider" artist Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) throbs with the sense of being trapped inside — trapped by circumstance, trapped in his head. Being an untrained artist who worked for his own diversion beyond the mainstream of the art establishment was not his problem. Ramírez was a true outsider, an alien — presumably illegal — in an often inhospitable country. Born in Los Altos de Jalisco, Mexico, Ramírez was a landowning farmer with a wife and four children who migrated north to... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/many-books-many-miles/45176/ Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST "My generation has a very awkward relationship with words and books," one of the best-known contemporary Chinese artists, Xu Bing, said in a recent interview. His parents worked at Beijing University, and he spent considerable time in the library: Before he could read, he was already very familiar with books as desirable objects. "By the time of the Cultural Revolution, I could read, but there weren't any books available. The entire country read only one book: Mao's 'Little Red Book.' We read... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/comics-with-a-sense-of-tragedy/44799/ Thu, 7 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST "I decided to take pencils, crayons, paints, sketchpads as my weapons to challenge the so called 'future,'" the South African Themba Siwela once wrote of his decision to become a comic-strip artist. Mr. Siwela is one of 35 artists, from approximately 20 countries, included in "Africa Comics," a poignant and utterly engrossing exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem. Most of the artists wield pencils or crayons as weapons against a miserable future or against political and social injustice... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/art-and-the-myth-of-fingerprints/43536/ Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?" is a new documentary about art authentication with dubious claims on its own legitimacy. Ostensibly, it tells the story of Teri Horton, a 73-year-old former long-haul truck driver with an "eighth-grade education" who happened to buy a large abstract painting at a thrift shop for $5. Never mind why she bought it (originally as a gift, even though she thought it ugly), what matters is that a local art teacher checked it out and thought the picture might be an... DANIEL KUNITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/muse-at-the-museum/42326/ Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Without ever having seen a photograph of her, I recognized Ada Katz immediately the first time I encountered her in person. She wasn't even standing near her somewhat less iconic husband, the artist Alex Katz. That's Ada, I thought: The mid-length black hair was now shot through with gray, but the face was unmistakable. My experience was not unique; among viewers of contemporary art, Ada is one of the most famous faces of the last half-century. What is unique, however — what is, in fact...