Okay, so I admit that posting the cover of a 1,200-page law book might not seem an obvious fit for a page about art. But as a critic, I've gotten a kick dipping into sections like "What Is Art" and "Who Is an Artist," let alone into copyright cases involving Andy Warhol and Richard Prince that I've written about. (I was sad not to see mention of the Metabirkins trademark case, since I was deeply involved in that. Maybe it will get into the next edition, given that the appeals court looks set to take another decade or two to reach a decision in it...)
I'm especially interested in all the light this book sheds (by accident, according to co-author Simon Frankel) on how our society thinks about art. Every time we pass a law about art that is different from laws we pass about, say, potatoes or toaster manuals, we're revealing the weirdly special status we grant it
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a couple of views from the solo show by Pat Oleszko, at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, New York. She's also got a big piece in the Whitney Biennial. (Which I'm seeing and reviewing tomorrow, for the Strictly Critical Substack—link in bio.)
In the Whitney reviews that I've read so far, critics have talked about how great it would be to see her work on the street in a march, and I think that gets things right, in a profound way. At the No Kings demonstrations I've attended, I've been desperate for some really grand and impressive ceremonial objects, to rile and cheer up the crowd, and Oleszko's blow-ups would have perfectly fit the bill. They'd have served a better purpose, there, than serving as "fine art" in a grand gallery. There are many other, sometimes better functions for a piece of visual culture than inviting attention as fine art. That should be seen as an option, when it suits, rather than as a creative object's highest calling.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a view onto the light table at the heart of "Mammoth," Nick Cave's show that opens Friday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I just published a big feature about it in the New York Times, but there was one aspect I didn't have room to address: By virtue of being filled with craft objects, like the ones favored by Cave's female relations, the whole show is working through ideas of the feminine. That seems especially important in a museological context, at the Smithsonian, that has tended to be built around the machismo typical of American science, anthropology and even art history. (Even though women often dominate museum staff, especially in art institutions.) As is typical of our moment, issues of gender and sexism — which affect and oppress half the world's population — get mostly ignored in the exhibition's catalog essays, whose (female authors) dwell instead on race and climate change.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is “Elevage de Poussière (Dust Breeding),” a 1964 print of a photo that Man Ray took in 1920 of Marcel Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” after it had sat for years collecting dust in his New York studio. I saw it in the group show called “Ground Work,” at Sean Kelly gallery in New York, that’s very much about materiality — and that made me think about Duchamp’s dust more than his “Glass”. I wonder if, in 1920, that dirt got his attention because of America’s newfound obsession with hygiene, and Europe’s supposed “backwardness” on that front. That’s also a subtext for his famous urinal, whose exhibition as art had much more current content than is often claimed. It wasnt just a bratty gesture.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is "Cheesehead," by Lucas Blalock , from his lovely Bureau Gallery twofer with Julia Rommel.
It's hardly news that the pictures you know affect the ones that you don't, but this was a great demonstration. I'm so used to seeing Blalock's Photoshop dissections (as in my second image) that I assumed that his shot of foam rubber cheese had to be manipulated. (Which I gather—??—it wasn't.) And those same virtual dissections, by Blalock, made me take special notice of, and care specially about, the physical slashing and reassembling in Rommel's abstractions (her "Wine and Cheese" is my third image.)
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a frame from Andy Warhol's newly discovered Screen Test of Dennis Hopper. It's one of 38 rolls of 16mm film that had sat undeveloped in MoMA's vaults until recently, a story I told in today's New York Times . (MoMA is screening the rolls on Feb. 2 at 6:30.) In this new Screen Test, Hopper is laughing and blows a kiss. In the weird alternate universe that Warhol created in and through his earliest films—and maybe in his early Pop paintings as well—that extra bit of lively, watchable action makes it one of the lesser examples of his art. The best of it asks us to watch as almost nothing happens.
His "Empire"—an eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Building— would have been a weaker film, if it had caught an exciting moment like the one in 1945, when a plane hit the building.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is "Physical Optics," painted in 1975 by the late Alfred Jensen, and now in his solo show at Arne Glimcher's 125 Newbury gallery in New York.
One of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of art involves distinguishing (or refusing to distinguish) between art made by so-called "outsiders," who might have had goals for their work that weren't "artistic," in the normal sense, and art made by people deeply inside the "artworld," for consumption there. Jensen's paintings in the Newbury show put that problem on the table like no other works. Jensen's paintings seem to have served deeply esoteric, possibly psychiatric and utterly personal needs of his own. On the other hand, he was a total art-world insider who clearly wanted his paintings, whatever their psychic origins, to circulate as that thing called "fine art."
My solution to the problem? I believe all art, from the Mona Lisa to a Rothko, is inherently "outsider" art, able to serve all kinds of non-art functions (including in the market, as décor, as status symbol etc). It only becomes "fine art," proper—art whose main function is to stimulate thought and talk and new making—at the moment an art lover chooses to use it as that.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is "Glass Tears," a 1933 image from the fabulous Man Ray show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wall text said that the photo was conceived (and used) for an ad for smudge-proof mascara.
Other texts explained that the second image at the top of this post, from the pages of the spring 1922 issue of the culture magazine Feuilles Libres, was the first publication of one of Man Ray's great photograms, with more published that fall on a page in Vanity Fair (my third image).
I've been working through ideas about the way that modern artists (and especially Marcel Duchamp) realized that, since the Renaissance, Western fine art has always been about picking out certain objects to use as art, rather than creating objects that were inherently art-full. (Because nothing stands as art, without being used as that.)
Man Ray's integration of fine and commercial art is grist for my mill, but I'm more interested, right now, in how fine art got adopted into the world of the commercial. I wonder if art directors intuited the modernist blurring of borders that I've been thinking about: If, at any given moment, an object might or might not be working as fine art, that meant that it might always be available for commercial purposes.
THE (UN-)DAILY PIC is a view of the current solo show by Ezra Johnson at Freight + Volume gallery in New York.
I'm interested in how Johnson shows the (putative, rhetorical) medium of his art form, stacked in cans in front of the images it produces. It's as though he's declaring the definitive made-ness of the paintings, as artifacts, even though they seem to be about the access they give to real things in the world. (Namely, the typical homes of Tampa, where Johnson teaches art at the University of South Florida.)
For a while now, I've been playing with ideas of "ostension," whereby works of art can be understood as giving transparent access – or, as pretending to give transparent access – to the world, regardless of the particular ways in which they give that access. They are just about pointing at things, regardless of how the pointing gets done. I've argued that certain kinds of aggressively un-fancy paintings, maybe like Johnson's, can be read as essentially "ostensional"—pointing-ish—in their aims.
Johnson's paint cans seem to be arguing the opposite position: That paintings are painted, and can only be understood in those terms.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is a still from Ragnar Kjartansson's new video called "Sunday Without Love," on view for another 10 days at Luhring Augustine gallery in TriBeCa in New York.
I reviewed the work in the New York Times, and was kind of happy with what I came up with. So here's the review:
Critic’s Notebook
Can the Fine Art World Finally Stomach Sentiment?
Paradox is at the heart of a new video by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, “Sunday Without Love,” which has its romantic side and undercuts it, too.
It’s the odd vintage postcard you could never resist at a thrift store.
In a field by a lake in some Alpine valley, a little crowd lolls about in period costume. Five men are in the blue smocks of 19th-century artists; four women are in that era’s frocks, shawls and bonnets. A final detail that’s vital: Breaking the chronology — pointing to the photograph’s postwar moment — one of the men is strumming an electric guitar.
That bizarre image has long hung on the fridge of the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, and it became the inspiration for his fascinating new video projection, titled “Sunday Without Love,” at Luhring Augustine gallery in New York through Dec. 20.
In a world drowning in irony and cynicism — easy to see why, in our moment — Kjartansson has dared to explore heartwarming sentiment. That makes his piece one of the most unusual, exciting works I’ve seen in a while.
For his video, Kjartansson (his name is pronounced RAG-ner kuh-YART-un-sun) set out to recreate his postcard as a live-action scene, complete with music. Donning a blue smock, the artist himself took on the role of the photo’s guitarist. He put a second guitar, two harps, a cello and a violin into the hands of his other costumed actors.
And he put lyrics into all their mouths.
“You must learn to live, live without love,” they croon, like the refrain in a pop song that comforts the heartsick. “Love is not good for you / Stop all this longing, looking at stars.”
Those phrases, repeated for the video’s full 19 minutes, are set to an irresistibly sweet, lilting melody by the composer David Thor Jonsson, Kjartansson’s frequent collaborator. Jonsson is normally an avant-gardist, but for “Sunday Without Love” he seems to have taken on the persona of a Brill Building songsmith, crafting heartache for B-sides.
By assigning the bromides of romance to old-time besmocked artists, Kjartansson evokes a time when ambitious fine art could still stomach sentiment.
His video doesn’t try to inhabit that Victorian moment by adopting its styles or tropes; that would be a dull rear-guard action, like trying to paint like a Pre-Raphaelite. But it asks us to try romance on for size once again, even though the action we’re watching, like the postcard it’s based on, seems so nearly absurd. It’s actually that contrast, between the silliness of the presentation and the seeming sincerity of the emotion, that gives the piece such power: Kjartansson puts obstacles in the way of its pop clichés, and lets us watch as they work anyway.
That’s a classic move in modern art: Do something that seems ridiculous — break vision into facets; cover a canvas in dripped paint; fill a gallery with Brillo boxes — and show that your work still pays artistic dividends.
A back story gets at Kjartansson’s version of that move. The heartfelt words in his video have been excerpted and translated from the chorus of “Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen” (“Learning to Live Without Love”), a 1996 comic song by the German singer Rocko Schamoni. It’s a cheesy tune, and remaining lyrics (“You have such lovely hobbies / A boat and a pony / And you always liked watching TV”) reveal a take on love and heartbreak that is completely cynical. That underlines how unlikely it was for Kjartansson to try to de-cynicise it, and makes his success more impressive.
In transforming Schamoni, Kjartansson is like a cutting-edge chef who uses Parmesan cheese in a dessert — not because it makes for a better sweet, but because the dessert’s unlikely sweetness takes on extra meaning.
“Sunday Without Love” inevitably invokes another precedent: Edouard Manet’s great painting, “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” from 1863. That work’s well-clad gentlemen and near-naked ladies, picnicking on a lawn by a pool, clearly throw some kind of spanner into the works of romance — as was clear to its first viewers, appalled by Manet’s cynical takedown of how love was supposed to appear in art. A century and a half later, Kjartansson is trying to undo Manet’s work — which, in today’s art world, feels almost as radical a concept as the one behind the “Déjeuner.”
I’m not sure that Kjartansson is truly, madly, deeply committed to the platitudes of romance, any more than Manet was incapable of heartfelt love. Rather, he manages to craft a genuinely romantic work of art, while never denying the deep absurdity of all romance — an absurdity recognized by most of the crafters of sentiment, and by some of their lovesick patrons, from the troubadours to Schubert to the Beatles writing “Yesterday.”
Paradox is at the heart of a lot of good art: Titian’s dead brushwork that stands for live flesh; Cézanne’s flatness that talks about shape; Warhol’s loving attack on consumerism. Kjartansson gives us sentiment that’s absurdly serious, and seriously absurd.
Ragnar Kjartansson: Sunday Without Love — Through Dec. 20, Luhring Augustine Tribeca, 17 White Street, Lower Manhattan, 646-960-7540; luhringaugustine.com.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is an installation called "Faire Foyer" by Sarah Crowner (b. 1974) at the @thebassmoa in Miami Beach. Crowner pairs her own bronzes of enlarged beach pebbles with the Bass's ceramic mural by Etel Adnan (1925-2021). At the recent art fairs in Miami, I saw a lot of fancy, showy and essentially meaningless abstraction in a mode that I call "Orthodontist Modern." (Sorry to all the orthodontists out there who happen to have good taste.) Seeing the Crowner installation, I somehow felt that she was embracing and addressing that tendency in interesting ways — especially in the sheer absurdity of expanding trivial pebbles into glitzy modern art.
And then there's the simple fact that the whole package looked pretty damn good.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC is Alex Webb's 1979 photo of "Mexicans arrested while trying to cross the border to the United States. San Ysidro, California," from The Hazlitt Collection currently on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa.
The image could so easily have been taken any day this year—how heartbreaking to think that nothing has really improved in almost 50 years. The very fact that desperate people feel the need to cross a dangerous border points to some kind of larger, world-wide systemic injustice that needs correction—as almost never seems to be pointed out even in so-called "liberal" publications.
But looking at this image, I'm reminded of how photojournalism of that era was always trying to rival the stylish effects of composition and color typical of modern "fine art."
I'm not sure the situation has changed that much, except that the "documentary turn" in (post)modern fine art has freed photojournalism to go back to its earliest, ostensional model. "Just the facts, ma'am," is as stylish a position as one could hope for, in the 21st century.
But I'm actually not sure it does a better job of communicating the facts than the earlier model did.
THE (UN)DAILY PIC: Of course there's a Caravaggio in "In Caravaggio's Light," the show of the Roberto Longhi collection that recently arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, FL. But I think the most interesting and even important thing in the show is this painting "of" Saint Bartholomew, along with its four mates that depict other saints (see my second image). All five artworks were painted in about 1612 by a young Jusepe Ribera, and it seems that they've never been presented this way, as a group on a single wall, since they were first commissioned by a Spanish diplomat.
What's particularly striking about Bartholomew is that the flayed skin he holds (he was martyred by being skinned alive) doesn't actually match his own features. as he holds up "his" skin: The skin has the beard and bold features of a man in middle age; the "saint" holding it is clean-shaven and old.
In the Renaissance it wasn't unusual to have a living person depicted as his or her patron saint. We can assume that the guy with the knife was named Bartholomew. But this painting deliberately draws attention to the artifice involved in that tradition—to the fact that the patron portrayed and the saint invoked are not in fact at all the same person. All that really ties them together, says Ribera, is the fact that they have the same name.
I think the power of radically illusionistic portraiture, as developed over the previous 100 years, had made it necessary to come clean about just what any picture actually showed. After 1500, the Renaissance was, in a sense, where we are with AI, and the same worries about what's "real" and what isn't were in play.
THE (UN-)DAILY PIC: This image of David with the head of Goliath, painted by the Neapolitan artist Andrea Vaccaro in about 1630, was one of my favorites from "In Caravaggio's Light," at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida. It's a show of gems (and not-so-gems) collected by the late, great Caravaggio scholar Roberto Longhi.
In the Vaccaro, I can't get over the tenderness that David seems to show to his conquered enemy. That right hand seems almost ready to caress the dead cheek. The bare flesh of David's chest and arm seems almost to embrace the giant's severed head. David's downcast eyes might betray a hint of melancholy longing; it's not impossible to imagine the painting's two faces meeting in a kiss. As imagined by Vaccaro, David seems more Narcissus than Perseus.
A subject that was almost always treated for its shock value here seems like an occasion to reflect on the poignancy of victory, even over your foes. Or is this an allegory of love and its battles?
The (un-)Daily Pic: Is a view of some of the pigment-covered stones that helped Anish Kapoor to his first big dose of fame, in the 1980s and '90s. I remember seeing them then, and being most entranced by the traces of blue pigment that ended up spread everywhere in the gallery, and beyond, thanks to the hands of over-curious visitors. I loved that interaction with the viewer — a kind of risk and even aggression, presented by objects that seemed mostly remote and contemplative. Works that seemed almost entirely formal ended up having a complex social dimension, almost as though they were in vexed conversation with their audience.
So when I recently interviewed Kapoor for the New York Times, I was surprised to find him entirely resistant to any positive reading of the messes his pigments have caused: "I always find it damned irritating, because I’m looking for that aesthetic purity, a kind of clarity," he said.
He's wrong — his works are better when they mess with their own purity.
The (un-)Daily Pic: Some of you (i.e., my parents, siblings, and maybe my six best friends) may have noticed that after almost 2,500 posts, my Daily Pic went awfully quiet in recent years, as I've been wrestling with some big projects. Well, it's time to start it again, if not with the madness of an absolutely daily post.
So here's a photo — an almost-self-portrait, in fact — by and of the Florida artist Selina Román, who has a solo show at the Sarasota Art Museum.
There's been plenty of art about "alternative" body types — think the self-portraits of Laura Aguilar or Iiu Susiraja — but they almost always toy with the abject. What I admire about Román's images is that they seem to entertain the real possibility of taking unproblematic, simple pleasure in a plus-size body. They imagine that a large body can be as straightforwardly pleasant, and present, and just normal as pink tights and a yellow body suit.
You can even do yoga in such a body, and clothe it at Lululemon.
Image courtesy the artist.
BLAKE GOPNIK on art @blakegopnik - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
