December 2007

John Zinsser's Miami Diaries reporting from the front line of the "fairest" city

posted 12/23/2007 DAVID COHEN on Thomas Demand at 303, Merlin James at Sikkema Jenkins
	Merlin James and Thomas Demand might seem as different as two contemporary artists can be. But a coincidence of means begs a comparison between shows of overtly contrastive mood and art-world temper. For both artists make their final images from models of their own making.

posted 12/23/2007 REUBEN BARON & JOAN BOYKOFF BARON on The Panza Collection at the Albright Knox
	As the skies become grey, the sunlight becomes scarce, and the air becomes frigid, we find in snowy Buffalo at the Albright-Knox, a respite for all of this, an oasis of color and light

posted 12/23/2007 JOE FYFE on Damien Hirst's Shark at the Metropolitan Museum
	Hirst seems to play to the peanut gallery, the broadest audience, those who think of art as hallowed, more so because they don’t understand it.

posted 12/11/2007 DAVID COHEN on Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Alex McQuilkin at Marvelli, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures
	Where Yasinsky accesses early girlhood through dolls and dinky illustration technique, McQuilkin seems dedicated to a perpetual state of teenage angst. The specific identification of both with early cinema relates to a broader trend in feminist-influenced art

posted 12/11/2007 JOE FYFE on Alex McQuilkin at Marvelli
	Alex Mcquilkin’s new two-screen projection film is ironic, sincere, casual, rigorous, knowing, adolescent, narcissistic, and emotionally generous. It is a small masterpiece about another masterpiece.

posted 12/23/2007 SANDRA SIDER on Mariana Cook at Deborah Bell Photographs
	As Cook drew upon the primal forces of her personal life, she also seems to have reached back to the essence of early photography.

posted 12/11/2007 DAVID CARRIER on Painting Then for Now, Fragments of Tiepolo at the Ca'Dolfin at David Krut Projects
	When these three Tiepolos at the Met were removed from the main salon of Ca’Dolfin, the intended site-specific lighting effects were lost. But Alpers, Hyde and Kulok recreate the way that, to quote Alpers and Baxandall, “the world, on Tiepolo’s account, presents a conundrum and his painting makes us conscious of having to work to make things out.”

posted 12/11/2007 SANDRA SIDER on Pattern and Decoration at the Hudson River Museum
	This exhibition is the first major East Coast retrospective of the Pattern and Decoration movement in more than two decades.

posted 12/4/2007 DREW LOWNSTEIN on The Age of Rembrandt at the Metropolitan Museum

Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer reinforce the picture plane by building their modernist compositions like so many overlaid computer windows, while Gerard ter Borch accentuates the picture window with a diagonally placed mantelpiece, bed, or table in his interiors.  Not to be outdone, Gerrit Dou uses the “window niche,” a framing device that he pioneered, to mediate our voyeuristic gaze into the private realm of the sitter.