I hope you’ve had this problem: You like some art somewhere but you hate the social machinery around it. You know something is good, but the discourse, the nepotism, the snobs, the takes, the informative six-page features, the art history teachers, the leachers, the...
I have a friend who, for the most part, paints abstract paintings. We were talking on the couch the other week about this period where she had started making not-abstract paintings. She had painted paintings with images of recognizable things, with words, with clear...
From the outside, the hotel lobby appeared to have (or be?) a gift shop—and an audaciously hip one. It said “porn” in awfully big letters, especially for a hotel lobby. I investigated. It didn’t have a gift shop, it was just a lobby, but it was a very fancy lobby....
It can be a disservice to describe an artist whose art describes a constantly changing self. 1. Kayla Tange looking platonically calm, platonically Asian, platonically a performance artist, dressed in an all-white so crisp it might be paper, in a great glass box...
Months back, when the pandemic was still running strong, I wrote about how much I wanted to go to a museum—even a mediocre one. Well, now I can and I did and I remembered that most things are bad. We can do whatever we want again, including wonder why we choose to do...
A lot has changed since 2011, when Maggie Nelson first published The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, her critically acclaimed collection of essays addressing violence and transgression in avant-garde art. One thing that’s changed is the word “trigger”—now much more...
The art-bureaucrat class is currently in a state of great anxiety over the differences between responsible and irresponsible art. The artists aren’t, but these categories aren’t up to them. Whether she wants to be or not, Kara Walker will—for the foreseeable future—be...
Who doesn’t like a bit of mystery? But where are they keeping it these days? There are certainly unknowns—when will this pandemic really end? Did they really do that? But mystery is not the same as a mystery. True crime, for example, isn’t mysterious. In the end...
Maggie West took over a large, dark space somewhere north of Frogtown last week and filled it with massive images of flowers, pulsating time-lapse photographed in UV light. The colors have weird harmonies: bad-acid Disney-villain purples and magentas, alien and dreamy...
You know when an airplane goes from just rattling back and forth to when it feels like the engines stopped and you drop, like, 20, 50, who knows how many feet and then picks up rattling again? I hate that. I don’t want to die. The nice thing about turbulence is it...
Kacie is The Public. More specifically, she said it would be fair to describe her as “A woman who doesn’t closely follow the contemporary art scene but might go to a show this summer”. ARTILLERY: Are you excited about going to see art now that the lockdown has ended?...
Since the theme for this issue is “Private Property,” I assume someone besides me will be tackling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their sudden rise to collectibility—I’ll leave that to someone who can talk about them in some sort of intelligent, technical way and...
So I was making the usual—you know: one part cherry juice, one part club soda, two parts peach juice—and thinking about how artists are eccentric. Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day, Grant Wood replaced his door with a coffin lid, and Paolo Uccello would...
I don’t want to paint anymore. I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point. Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line...
We’ll be hearing for years and maybe decades about how the pandemic affected the lives of all the artists we’re used to hearing about but the crisis is going to have far deeper and more far-ranging effects on the art world than what we’ll be able to read on the...
An inevitable consequence of democracy, of equality, of freedom; of systems and technologies that more evenly distribute the power to influence the world; is the production and distribution of a tremendous amount of bad art. More of us learning means more of us know...
You could draw people in masks. Paint them. Paint on them. Make videos where the face above changes but the mask does not, challenging the viewer to notice and read the eyes, the hairline. You could fashion new masks or sculpt respirators. And the gloves, too:...
Many artists, we’ve been told, are obsessed. The way they repeat a subject, or a theme, their attention to detail or to finish, or just the impressive volume of work they produce, can only be explained by obsession. They think about feet or toast or red a lot—maybe...
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