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…
By Karen Schiff One fine morning at the Harvard Art Museums, at about this time last year, I poked into the Fogg’s ongoing Bernini exhibition, mounted in a cozy room to the left of the entrance. I wanted to check…
By KAREN SCHIFF “Art is never a commodity,” declared Peter Schjeldahl, at Boston University on October 4, “though it can be treated as if it is one.” Schjeldahl, the senior art critic at The New Yorker, was trying to reassure…
By KAREN SCHIFF When you walk into the Allston Skirt Gallery this month, it looks as if Roberta Paul’s spin on “Creation : Science” is all mapped out. Her exhibition’s title suggests a fundamental Question: Who gets the final word…
By KAREN SCHIFF Imagine taking a fistful of crayons, wrapping them in a spider’s sac, hanging the sac from an open windowframe, and letting a gentle breeze make the colors repeatedly graze against a paper screen. Artist Laurie Reid –…
By KAREN SCHIFF When the Museum of Modern Art reopened in Manhattan, Eva Hesse’s sculptural assemblage of knee-high translucent rumpled cylinders, “Repetition Nineteen III” (1968), was installed behind a wall that held a large Agnes Martin painting. The pairing was…
By KAREN SCHIFF On the opening day of Abigail Child’s exhibition of films and prints Mirror World, film theorist Laura Mulvey gave a talk at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A coincidence of scheduling? Of course…but a highly appropriate…