Matthew Barney gets high praise – among “the greatest [artists] of the last 50 years”. His work – video, “wonderous” sculpture, drawings – is undoubtedly influential. Skeptics persist, though, seeing his work as less than the sum of its parts. One reviewer thinks his current show a “visual dreamscape, both on the movie screen and in the gallery space [but] without legible intent.”
An interesting and at times hyperventilating piece. Are AI images art? Probably yes. It’s a big step, though, to fretting that AI might “dominate” aesthetic trends. AI uses existing works to create a software ‘recipe’ for a given genre, such as portraiture. Novel (and lucrative) this art may be, but it isn’t inspired by new ideas. No-one is talking about a “shock of the new”.
Hofmann taught a who’s who of 20th century American artists. That distinction overshadows his reputation as an artist, despite his leading role in New York abstract expressionism. Perhaps teaching provided the gestation period for his late career achievement, ‘colour plane abstractions’. They are “the pinnacle of American academic abstraction … a world of floating forms”.