Visual Arts
It’s not a simple story. It’s a story about dreadful ideas, hideous politics and their interaction with art and aesthetic judgment.
In some ways, Jonathan Jones’ narrative structure works against his strengths. Highly respected as a critic, he is an energetic and engaging writer and excels at what art historians call “close looking,” where he guides the reader line by line, brush stroke by brush stroke, through a work of art.
The month’s standouts include Nick Cave’s Soundsuits at the Peabody-Essex Museum and two exhibitions at MassMoCA.
At times I leave off my avid samplings of one entrancement after another in a great museum. Instead, I make a pilgrimage dedicated to a single work, such as John Singer Sargent’s intoxicating woman in white in “Fumée d’Ambre Gris” at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
For those who missed this evening, pick up Roz Chast’s “Theories of Everything,” which is a wonderfully huge collection of her cartoons published in “The New Yorker.”
Artist Michael Lewy’s comprehensive, clever and surprisingly humorous take on an imaginary experimental settlement explores the ramifications of having human potential promptly assessed and harnessed for work, and work alone.
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.
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