Kara Walker’s art focuses on racism and misogyny. So, in the uproar over Charlottesville and its aftermath, her latest show was bound to be controversial. And it certainly is that. “Walker’s work is a reminder that good art may be confrontational, but it is never didactic; rather, it holds a mirror up to life and demands only that you see what you see in that reflection.”
“Popularity,” says Perry “is a serious business.” Via his art and associated media activity, he has become a popular – and astute – social commentator on contemporary Britain. So why does he irk some critics? Is it art world anxiety that popularity denotes a lack of seriousness? Or is it that Perry, a potter, wants to show that “craft is also “art,” and that it belongs to us all.” More images are here.
Op art was popular in the 1960’s but these days is passé. This review mounts a defence. This show “is a genuinely independent display of curatorial thinking. And I cannot tell you what a relief it is to encounter it. [Pop art is] the artistic equivalent of having an ice cream on a sunny day. The art world … needs to stop obsessing about identity and to place some renewed trust in its eyes.”
How much do fashion and art overlap? In the case of Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, quite a lot. “This is the stylist’s art taken to a whole new, one wants to say philosophical, level. Draping, wrapping, clustering, layering, stacking, scattering, and scaffolding—all the verbs of Postminimalist sculpture have their counterparts in the techniques of the needle trades.” Multiple images are here.
The Rauschenberg retrospective, now in New York, is reviewed in the context of the 1950’s New York art scene. Art for the abstract expressionists was about portraying their inner impulses. Rauschenberg, however, “was interested in making art out of the disparate and impersonal matter of everyday life, the castoffs of commodity culture. He wanted his work to express, not himself, but the strange new world around him.”
Africa gets its first world class museum of contemporary African art. Unreserved celebration? Well, not quite. Is it appropriate that such an institution be based in South Africa? Does it matter that the drivers of this project are white males? Can one institution capture what it means to be African? All good questions – but at least now those interested in African art won’t have to go to Europe. A background video is here.
We take perspective for granted but it only appeared in painting around 1400. Before that Byzantine iconography was the dominant style – no sense of depth, figures without a sense of volume or genuine emotion. Around 1300 Giotto broke with this tradition by painting from real life and Giovanni followed suit. But, progressive and talented though Florence was, it took another century before realism was fully mastered.
Few modern artists can draw as big a crowd as Jeff Koons. And equally few artists cause as much nashing of critics’ teeth. How come? “With Koons, we are liberated from the shame we might normally feel in liking the kitsch we are otherwise told is deplorable. “The art world wants to say to Koons, You can’t like this! To which Koons must reply, I can and I do. And so, in your heart of hearts, do you.” To dismiss Koons as completely vapid means taking the vapidness of his art at face value. But that’s exactly what it is impossible to do in looking at, for instance, Bear and Policeman. A sculpture that strange cannot, by definition, be called vapid. It’s very strangeness forces us to take it more seriously.”
With an imminent retrospective at Tate the British sculptor Rachael Whiteread is in the spotlight. She is best known for her casts of internal spaces including, famously, the inside of an old terrace house. “I think of her work as dominated by memory rather than memorial, and marked by traces of warm life as much as chill death. Whiteread’s great pieces are sighs made tangible.” A short video (8 min) is here.
Richter was designing record covers and posters before a belated burst of study led him to discover painting. “Hugely influential” according to one critic, Richter’s work is being featured for the first time at a London public gallery. He often draws inspiration from photos in the media to which he adds his own political commentary, sometimes giving a sense of the “retired anarchist”. An interview with Richter (28 min) is here.
In 1975, Christie’s (and Sotheby’s) charged a mere 10% “buyer’s premium” on art works sold. Art prices have since skyrocketed but so too have transaction charges. With yet another fee hike coming is this just the auction houses focusing on “high end” sales? Perhaps. But part of the explanation surely is the need for art – touted as an “asset class” – to be easily bought and sold. And who provides that valuable service? The auction houses.
An appreciation – with misgivings – of the great art critic. A self-confessed cultural elitist, Hughes criticized Australia for its shortcomings, only to then rail against New York’s imperial tendencies. But then there was his fine prose: “Hughes’ prose is often like architecture itself, a solid, tangible construction, which, after a first pass, one can wander through again musingly, appreciating the shapely details within the foundation.”
Fin de siècle Vienna was a nervy place and it produced some nervy artists. Richard Gerstl was certainly one of those. Talented but unhappy he had an affair with a friend’s wife which was promptly discovered. Uproar ensued and, shortly thereafter, Gerstl committed suicide at just 25. “[D]id mental illness shape his style, or does his work look especially desperate because we read backwards from his suicide?”
Later this month the Royal Academy of Arts opens a major retrospective of the American artist Jasper Johns, the first such show in London for 40 years. In a few weeks an interview about this landmark show between co-curator Dr Roberta Bernstein and Easel Contributing Editor Morgan Meis will be published in the newsletter. Then, in early October, with the kind permission of the Royal Academy, the newsletter will carry the catalogue essay that Morgan has written for the show.