A paean for disruptive art. Dadaists attacked beauty as a “boring sort of perfection” and many famous names embraced this view. Does the art market prefers inoffensive art? Perhaps, but major institutions seem to be embracing the new and ugly. Hence, today’s ugly might just be tomorrow’s ‘wild and daring’. Or, as the writer notes: “to achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance”.
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.”
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.”