Newest Features
William J. Simmons: Tell me about your shows in Dallas and New York City. What direction is your new work taking? David Salle: The show in Dallas brings together paintings from the last five years or so that, for the most part, are configured as vertical stacked diptychs: 2 panels conjoined along a horizontal spine; sometimes they become a horizon line. There are some other configurations—side-by-side diptychs, multi-panel extravaganzas, but that’s the dominant mode. Like a marine painting: sea below, sky above, although in this case the “sea” panel is a portrait…
Open Engagement is an annual conference on socially engaged art, focused this year on the topic of Place and Revolution. It was an incredibly dense three days of concurrent ninety-minute sessions, shorter fifteen-minute talks, opening and closing keynotes, and events throughout Pittsburgh featuring both conference-affiliated projects and ongoing work by local artists and community organizers. A strength of OE is its inclusion of a wide breadth of what qualifies as socially engaged art, as participants gather for an opportunity to evaluate how a social practice can have an impact in the art…
The Icelandic singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir inaugurates the world tour for her new album Vulnicura with seven concerts in New York City, beginning in March 2015 in Carnegie Hall and ending in July at the Governors Ball Music Festival. She took the stage for her second concert in the majestically restored Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. Against a rapturous welcome, Björk began singing from her new album accompanied by the string orchestra Alarm Will Sound, the percussionist Manu Delago, and the electronic musician Arca. She wore a diaphanous white dress that concealed the contours…
Every two years the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) selects up to four Boston-area artists to receive the James and Audrey Foster Prize. In addition to a cash award, finalists are given the opportunity to mount a show in the ICA gallery space. Since 1999, this has been a time for the ICA to showcase local talent, ultimately contributing to a larger discourse about the role that arts institutions play in supporting Boston’s creative economy. The 2015 Foster Prize has been awarded to Ricardo De Lima, Vela Phelan, Sandrine Schaefer, and…
It’s now an old story—art fairs contribute to globally homogenized tastes in art. Galleries travel around the world and bring their artists with them, so the same aesthetics start appearing in museums and collections everywhere. But what if the art fairs’ venues promote the homogenization of artworks? We wander in corridors of cubicles; galleries can only display small samplings of art in each. Our attention blurs and we zone out—”zombie distraction.” Might these conditions, both external and internal, engender a blandness in the art we are expecting, or able, to see? For…
It has been a project years in the making, and finally their idea has taken shape. Drawing inspiration from the iconic Marvel Universe cards, the set of 30 Art World Universe trading cards depicts contemporary artists including 12 heroes, 12 villains, and 5 legends. Although in the process of getting the cards fully funded, this project deserves a level of attention and recognition for its originality. So before their first series is distributed, I spoke with the artists responsible for these fantastical art characters to gain more insight into their collaboration and…
In Boston, as well as in the UK, religion has been declining. That is, the idea of “The Church” as an organized body or religious power has been challenged, particularly within younger generations. In 2012 Boston was ranked in the bottom 10 cities in the US with regards to how many citizens identified as very religious. Those that attend church in metropolitan cities, like Boston or Washington D.C., have claimed that the church is fundamentally out of touch with the realities of their lives. Many cite hypocrisy of the church, proclaiming it…
Thoreau heard trains in Walden. There is the recorded sound of one in the exhibition Walden, revisited, on view through April 26 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, but there is nothing to suggest that it is anything other than a modern intrusion, rather than a report of Thoreau’s own experience. A rail line ran not far from his cabin. “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,” he writes in Walden, “sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard…” Although his simile tries…