Visual Arts
Standout exhibitions starting up in January include a show that celebrates Islamic Art at Harvard’s Sackler Museum.
Sound artist Tutschku employs audio selections that are briefly broadcast periodically throughout the course of the day to startle and surprise listeners, to crack the shell of our typically prosaic and hectic modern lives.
In the first few days of our first visit to China, I was nonetheless unable to keep myself from formulating a hypothesis. In China the distinction between art, artifice and artificiality is not drawn as sharply as it is, at least in principle, in the West.
Cut out of translucent and colored ox or donkey hide (sorry, PETA), they are foot and a half tall, two-dimensional figures operated by rods set up behind a slightly canted screen.
The more cerebral visitor may leave “Collision18:present” wondering if, like the classic definition of what constitutes pornography, ‘cyberart’ is firmly situated in the eye of the beholder (or of the curators).
The enduring aspect of Paul Klee’s art is its playfulness, which bubbles up even out of this viscous curatorial treatment.
If you try to take Camille Paglia seriously, despite the occasional insight you might find along the way, in the end it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion that you’ve made a category error.
In order to pay tribute to the supreme Frits Lugt and his Fondation Custodia — and to protest the announced closing of the Institut Néerlandais with which it is joined — the column describes an example of Lugt’s collecting genius.
What percentage art? What percentage terrorist attack?
Visual Art Commentary: Silence Is Complicity — Why Museums Must Use Their Voice to Defend Democracy