If Martin Creed had been alive in Medieval Europe, it is easy to imagine him as an admired court jester, entertaining the royals with dashes of absurdity while at the same time speaking truth to power, gingerly prodding the monarch. Creed delights in tweaking, and even flouting, convention. He hatches harebrained schemes—usually just single, simple […]
Let’s cut to the chase: the Whitney Museum of American Art’s inaugural show in its new home in the Meatpacking District, “America Is Hard to See,” is outstanding. With about 600 works by a little over 400 artists, it offers a history of American art—and America—that is richly textured and that teems with beloved classics […]
Anyone in need of a potent antidote to the feeding frenzy at Art Basel Miami Beach last week should head right now to Paula Cooper Gallery’s second-floor space at 521 West 21st Street in West Chelsea. On view there is a solo show by the German–born, New York–based artist Hans Haacke, whose six-decade career is […]
The publicist said they had to open the doors to the NADA fair at the Deauville Beach Resort five minutes early because the crowd was that eager. Publicists are paid to say those kinds of things, but inside there was a veritable feeding frenzy that gave off the feeling of a Moroccan street market. The day’s […]
Montclair show tours the land artist’s Garden State legacy. On a frigid morning this past winter, the art historian, critic and curator Phyllis Tuchman was guiding her blue Mercedes sedan through the desolate parking lot of a shopping plaza in Bayonne, N.J., past a Super Stop & Shop, a Starbucks and a Houlihan’s, toward an […]
The late German artist Sigmar Polke was not the type to make things easy for anyone. After trying to interview him in Los Angeles in 1995, reporter Kristine McKenna wrote that she felt like Margaret Dumont “trying to get a straight answer out of the Marx Brothers.” That same year, British critic Adrian Searle showed up at Polke’s […]