John Ashbery's recent collection of poetry"Your Name Here" shows him at the hieght of his powers not as a surrealist but as a surrealist/realist. Therein he indeed throws the proverbial cow up over the moon as might any symbolic bard of the unlikeley.
Read MoreWelcome to a magic-tragic carpet ride where all the stories of what made the desert oasis of Las Vegas the overblown Oz it is today come together as one.The story of Las Vegas and the story of it's making according to authors Roger Morris and Sally Denton is the story of America. This is the book that credits the entire cast: the cowboys, the mob, the miners, the Shepard's, the military industrial complex, the entertainers, the teamsters, the Mormon bankers, and the journalists-In fact almost everybody except Hunter S. Thompson and Dave Hickey.
Read MoreI thought it would take until the turn of the century to read The Turn of the Century, the 659 Kurt Anderson novel on what it is like to be a middle aged post-millenial infotainment yuppie. In this tale set in the twelve-month cycle just after New Years 2000, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Zimbalist and her husband George Matcier beat a path through a mercenary infested jungle of avaricious do-gooders for themselves parading under the professions of media executive, financier, and boutique industry irreplacable....
Read MoreSo here this writer sits as if an upwardly flowing odalisque and on his futon types on his laptop in order to compare Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is illuminated" (as further illuminated by the movie version directed by Leiv Schreiber and starring Toby Maguire { a piece in which the author refers to himself as the writer or Jonathan Safran Foer who is a character in the story itself in the third person via the voice of a narrator a young Ukrainian man named Alex who travels with a dog) (a bitch he calls her) named Sammy Davis jr. jr.} to Brett Easton Ellis's "Lunar Park" (where the writer himself is the character in the first person living his life in what might have been or a duplicate reality (a what if?) which then is seamlessly blended in with strains based on reality and a chaser of a couple of shots of that which is otherwise embellished as well).
Read MoreThe virtual and partial symbolic representation for and replacement of the physical elements of human life are monumental alterations to the nature in which those with access and or witness to technology interact with and within the universe. As the time members of our species engage in and between simulated and physical realities fluctuates the pictures that our perception forms of the tangible elements of existence change. Moreover then henceforth artists' and viewers' respective expressions and or understanding of physical reality in the fine and applied arts in physical space and cyberspace evolve. Summarily one of the phenomenological progressions in this relatively new inter-dimensional dialectic addressing how both painterly and morphically responsive digital textures emerge with the facility of one paradigm translated into the dimension of another (as well as in what could be termed visually hyphenated hybrid forms) is "Hypertexture".
Read MoreOne small step for gallery goers one giant step for bullshit; that's a bit extreme; but, this artonaut having landed on planet Gladstone/ whether gladly or not; but, as a gadfly sent by a glad hand extended by telephone/ I did not know what to expect after Steve cannon said "you will like it."
Read More"The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is a retelling of the Orpheus myth in the post-modern guise of an inverse roman a clef of current history. Everybody is along for the ride Ahmet Ertegun, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Andy Warhol etceteras. It is the story of post-partition India invading the musical superculture, the jet stream upon which cultures actually interface.
Read MoreFar be it from this reviewer to sound like the book jacket blurbs on the hardcover edition of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections-.however it was a smooth ride. Through what terrain was the cruise control on you ask? Through the dispersing of a family and three of its five core members from Midwest to East Coast. The volume is about values and truth; lies, and what matters at closing time. Each time the emergency brake on the narrative of this volume is released it always manages to effortlessly return to its strident course. Meanwhile Franzen's wordy pour as fluid as petrol eventually leaves us off at the finale {which in the end remains perhaps the most questionable feature of this book}.
Read MoreThis writer was not able to travel up to the new DIA Beacon, New York museum in the old Nabisco box factory for the press preview on the second Sunday in May. However, on the Sunday following he made his way to the new place in the old space at the bottom of the descent of hill in the still sleepy river town.
Read MoreThe All star corps of an exquisite corpse/becomes a corpse/What becomes an exquisite corpse most One should walk into "Desire unbound", the survey of work from the late Surrealist movement (which originated at the Tate Gallery in London and now at the time of this writing in a re-charted version at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York); as one should walk into any exhibition -or for that matter into a dream. Therein having dropped as many preconceptions as possible one should in the best of all possible worlds at least try to re-examine what is before one under the new parameters set up for them to take in the art.
Read More"Dada," was criticism of art in and of itself, so, to sit and criticize criticism is like the proverbial dust inheriting the wind. The movement was oh so brief!...and now the venerable venues the Metropolitan Museum and National Gallery of Art in WDC have tried to recreate the spirit of via its' objects its' films and to a lesser or greater degree it's now all but deceased personalities.
Read MoreHow can one review a bequest but if by request? Just as per a collection of works not yet donated but expected to be bequeathed an exhibition of a donated collection or an amalgamation of different donors gifts is like a meal at a restaurant -the gift in the end is the purchaser's choice. So in reviewing "American Legacy" (an exhibition of works recently donated or otherwise coerced -just kidding) by members of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art I will just speak on individual works and other movements in pieces.
Read MoreThe over the well of and over the railing wall of the museum jumbotron conglomerate with the Mathew Barney "Cremaster" retrospective startles you at the summit improper at the Guggenheim showplace on Fifth Avenue. Here the ultimate art stadium of winds; ascents, and descents is (and maybe now at the time of your reading-was) given forth to spectacle legitimized by the invisible critical faculty (as to whomever the spectator horde becomes that day might begin to drool over the ledge to the scenes of punk mosh pits; Richard Serra slinging sculptural porridge, and paralympian champion Aimee Mullins reconfigured as a cheetah -all from the Cremaster three installment of the five film cycle around which the entire exhibit centers?)
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