“Have you noticed, that people are still having sex? All the denouncement, had absolutely no effect.” —LaTour, “People Are Still Having Sex,” 1991 After a long conversation with my Lyft driver about the cult he’d just joined, I walked into “The Pleasure Principle” at...
Everything about the way we talk about art in public is vestigial, left over from the birth of print. Once upon a time this conversation was done entirely with ink: ink was expensive, photographs of art were more expensive and photos in color were even more expensive...
“The only principle in art is balance,” this was my high school art teacher and she was great—but that was hack advice. If you’re trying to realistically draw a chair (which we were always trying to do in high school) you can make the legs too long or make them too...
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...
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says...
If you’ve been to a museum lately you’ve noticed all the not-art. The artist’s notebook, the artist’s ticket to Switzerland, the fragment of the stage still containing the burn-mark from the performance, the suit the artist wore during the performance, the chart the...
Q: What are your influences? A: Mediocre things, like this interview. That’s a terrible question. So I think “When I do an interview, I need to remember to ask better questions than that.” Q: But people make their own connections between your work and that of other...
Writing “It’s beautiful but…” means you’re stupid. Other fields don’t put up with this shit. “Delicious” is no joke: in the 17th century the Dutch and Portuguese went to war over it (Spice War: 1602 to 1663, ended with the Treaty of the Hague). No matter how...
Regular readers might remember a column from a few months ago where I got loud about how publicists are just one more way the art world has found to reward privilege by granting it more privilege so then started a search for the most obscure artist in LA so I could...
I think we might have to consider the possibility that fine art is a genre. Or perhaps has become a genre. Someone clever whose name neither I nor Google can retrieve right now once said that philosophy is the spawning ground of the sciences—meaning that the things we...
I know a curator who used to work for Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen—her job was to look through all the old press clippings and organize them. “That must’ve been interesting,” I said, “did you notice anything?” “Well,” she said “in the ’60s, Carolee...
Artists will ask, “What’s your Instagram?” It’s horrible. Anything: Twitter, Facebook, just Google me, even asking for a business card is fine (even though I’ve never had one), but not my Instagram. Please? Melissa is millennial. She keeps DMT in her vape pen—“Well,...
Galleries usually just send you their press releases, but sometimes you get them from a whole PR firm. I’m on this firm’s list now, and they’re very tenacious: Hi Zak: I have a really exciting new exhibit to tell you about... Hi Zak: I wanted to follow up yesterday’s...
You find out about Cosey Fanni Tutti’s various bodies of work by rumor or implication—did you know that someone once did this? Did you know it was the same woman who did that? Cosey started out as a little girl named Christine Newby, in Hull, in the U.K., in 1951. She...
“Regrettably, the provocative nature of your content is likely unsuitable for our audience at this time.” It may shock you to discover that artists still get told this. It may shock you to discover that—in the fine arts, in Los Angeles, California, in 2017—shock still...
Let me be honest with you, New York, I can start a Wednesday all about a museum visit on Friday but by Thursday evening the empty glasses, subway transfers and texts will have stacked up and in the anxious back-brain, an idea will begin to pool and shift and the...
The art world is in a genteel panic—reliable work isn’t selling, galleries are moving and closing, Andrea Rosen has said she’ll no longer represent living artists. It’s not that the artists have become any less imaginative or capable, it’s economics: Donald Trump has...
If you ever said fine art was a political act, you were wrong. Consciousness-raising—as art’s broad project, as an abstraction somehow implied in the diversions and ironies of what is done in galleries—did not work. Or, as a press release might put it: received...
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