Hermes Knauer, Part II

by Michelle Millar Fisher, September 2012. In Part II of our conversation with Hermes Knauer, the master restorer discusses his forty-year history with the Met and the importance of remembering “to do no harm.” Audio + transcript below. Artwrit: So Thomas Hoving came to speak at your high school graduation.Hermes Knauer: Right. And talked about this…

Ghosts in the Machine at the New Museum, New York

by Stavros Pavlides, September 2012 The anthropomorphic robot is obsolete. What was once the mascot of technological evolution has become a signifier of speculative antiquity. Today, our tech fears have become disembodied things, nebulous clusters of data as legion as they are anonymous. In light of this, the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Ghosts in…

Ellsworth Kelly/Prints at the Portland Art Museum

by Erin Stout, September 2012 Works on view in the interior sculpture court at the Portland Art Museum inevitably serve as precursors to the museum’s main exhibition, Ellsworth Kelly/Prints. During the spring months of 2012,a few pieces by Joseph Beuys, including the large and visceral environmental sculpture Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch (Lightning with Stag in its Glare),…

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

by Laura Leffler, September 2012 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints portraits. More than that, she explores the history of portrait painting. There exists in her works a link between the sitters, poses, even the costumes and colors of artists as diverse as Holbein, Courbet, Manet, John Singer Sargent, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas and Barkley L. Hendricks. What…

The Demise of Artnet Magazine and the Crisis in Criticism

by Michael Pepi, September 2012 In 1996, the venerable art historian and critic Donald Kuspit identified two chief modes of art writing—metaphysical and journalistic—accurately describing the ways they have contributed to different forms of malaise within criticism at large. Kuspit describes academic, “metaphysical” criticism as “formal and poststructural analysis” that “‘redesigns language’ in its attempts…

Revitalizing Chicago

by Britt Julious, September 2012 Due to a lack of prestige, art-world recognition, funding and infrastructure support, Art Chicago—the massive art exposition once held in Grant Park but ultimately relegated in 2006 to the Merchandise Mart in the River North neighborhood of the city—crumbled under the weight of its own age. The most successful art…

Museum: A Collection of Modern Day Artifacts

by Echo Hopkins, September 2012 Tucked under scaffolding, down an unassuming alley in TriBeCa, the last thing one would expect to find is an art space. Museum is located in an eighty-square-foot freight elevator at the back of what was once a paper factory. The interior has been overhauled, receiving a fresh coat of white…

Regaining Momentum: The Poetic Potential of The Artist Talk

by Anthony Romero, September 2012 Poetry is a highly contested medium. Over the last seventy years alone western art history has seen poetry described as personism and projective, howling and silent. It has, as Robert Creely says of Pound, been forms “cut in time as sculpture is a form cut in space.” Earlier in the…

Tino Sehgal at Tate Modern, London

by Matthew Steinbrecher, September 2012 Since 2000, Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern has played host to the Unilever Series, an annual commission asking artists to create new works specifically for the site. This has led to the development of monolithic works such as Olafur Eliasson’s towering sun in Weather Patterns, Miroslaw Balka’s box of overwhelming…