In a short drive into the countryside of Maryland, about half an hour outside Washington, DC, is an exceptional private museum sited on 230 rolling acres, with buildings and outdoor sculpture thoughtfully tucked into the landscape. The Glenstone is the brainchild of...
Bilbao Guggenheim: Fuck the Box
I had wanted to see the Guggenheim Bilbao since it first opened. Ed Moses and I had once met up, completely by accident, in London. He had flown in from San Francisco and I from Los Angeles, arriving within the same hour. Ed invited me to stay with him, saying he had...
APOCALYPSE NOW: Venice Biennale
The malaise of our times is encapsulated and iterated over and over in this year’s Venice Biennale—whether racial conflict, gender redefinition, women’s rights, immigration, environmental threats, or any combination thereof. One begins to wonder, as one wanders...
Mexico City: Bursting with Vitality
On a narrow one-way street in San Miguel Chapultepec, it’s impossible to miss the disparate wood-paneled exterior of Kurimanzutto. Surrounded by modernist apartment buildings in a rich palette of burnt sienna, robin’s-egg blue and royal yellow, the gallery’s presence...
No Vacancy
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to spend a night in a gallery or a small museum, and wished you could walk down a motel hallway and see original murals on your way to the ice machine instead of prints that could have—and possibly did—come from a Walmart...
Paradise Found
“I paint almost every day,” says Rich Untermann, owner of the Spanish Garden Inn in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara. “When I like a painting, I frame it, and hang it someplace in the hotel. I shift them around until they feel comfortable—it is in a constant...
CODE ORANGE: JULY/AUGUST 2019
Congratulations to our winner LARRY MANTELLO and our finalists. Mantello's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery. His image is also printed in the July/August issue of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists from the July/August contest....
SHOPTALK
Artificial Intelligence Gets Uppity The future is closer than we think. Yours Truly has been binge-watching the series Humans on Amazon Prime, which has a remarkable cast playing “Synths,” or Synthetics, in a future-world where AI androids take over the menial and...
David Hammons
David Hammons, an infamously reclusive yet pervasive figure, is undoubtedly a pioneer and solidified staple of the art world. His thought-provoking work permeates the visual language of contemporary art making. From his Duchampian repurposing of found objects, to his...
Desert Places
Picking up Highway 62 on the outer edges of Palm Springs takes you up to the high desert in which you drive through endless urban scar tissue a block deep on either side of the road, until you get to Andrea Zittel’s 50-acre spread. Leaving the highway you ascend on a...
Art Brief
The Me Too movement has pushed the private behavior of artists and performers into the public square. Accusations of sexual harassment have damaged the reputations of dozens of artistic figures from Chuck Close to Kevin Spacey. The question is whether these...
Under the Radar
If you’ve been following my recent columns here, you’ll know I’ve been on a bit of an ’80s counter-nostalgia binge, looking at an alternate history to the period, conjured from the last dregs of genuine counterculture before techno, grunge and the internet came to...
Decoder
To see the Goddess Durga Slaying the Demon Buffalo Mahisha you take the green train in Manhattan to the most boring neighborhood during the most boring part of the day, wait in one to three lines and pay what you wish. Take the big steps up over the Celtic art, take a...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
Bunker Vision
In 2012 a YouTube user named Sabine started uploading a film in 10-minute segments. The story went that while on a visit to North Korea, a dissident had slipped Sabine a DVD of a propaganda movie that was showing on North Korean state television. The idea of such a...
COMICS
Reconnoiter
Giorgio de Finis is currently the artistic director of MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art Rome) where he has organized the sprawling MACRO Asilo project. He has opened up this institution to a citywide influx of creative energies, involving hundreds of artists,...
TONY CONRAD
“Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective” is the first large-scale museum survey devoted to work originally presented by the artist in his museum and gallery exhibitions. It premiered at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and has traveled to the Institute of Contemporary...