In the summer, the art world reverts to a kind of school semester mentality. Galleries shut on Saturdays if they’re even open to the public (and even then, close altogether in August), and often mount group shows based on whimsical themes. Museums, however, are obliged to stay open and service the hordes of visitors, but even they may tend to show art of a less academic nature, such as photography, or graphic or industrial design. With featured installations by two artists, the New Museum has managed to strike a balance between preferred summer art mediums and a historically and politically relevant conscience. David Goldblatt’s photographs of apartheid/post-apartheid South Africa occupy two floors, and Emory Douglas’ graphic designs for the Black Panthers fill another. read more
This Spring, two museum shows pegged to age groups are facing off from each other across the length of Manhattan. Downtown, through July 5, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting the first in its series of “generationals”—tri-annual surveys of contemporary artists aged 33 and under—titled “Younger Than Jesus.” Uptown, through August 2, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is offering “The Pictures Generation,” a historical look at the artists—most famously Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince—who re-introduced representational art to the Conceptualism-heavy New York art world of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (The Met round-up takes it name from the seminal 1977 exhibition, “Pictures,” in which some of these artists made their initial splash.) It’s tempting to see the concurrence of these shows as a demographic smackdown—Baby Boomers vs. Millennials—but more relevant, perhaps, is the fact that both shows betray a similar conceit: That artistic expression is inevitably a byproduct of whatever visual technologies are shaping society at the time an artist comes of age. This isn’t a new idea, exactly: It’s easy to see how, in retrospect, Impressionism was sparked by the advent of photography in the mid-19th century. But lately, the role that the media play in shaping aesthetics has become foregrounded as a curatorial conceit. In this sense, “The Pictures Generation” and “Younger Than Jesus” seem to represent art in the ages of television and the internet, respectively. read more
Walking over to the shimmering New Museum to see the exhibition After Nature, I stepped over a dead baby bird on Prince Street, and then some oily treacle running down the Bowery. It was a suitable overture to the show, which “surveys a landscape… darkened by uncertain catastrophe.” This clever and terrifying collection of work from a broad timeframe is organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions at the New Museum. (See this special online version of the exhibition; click on the underlined words to move organically through the artworks.)
An anchor for the show is Werner Herzog’s film, And A Smoke Arose—Lessons of Darkness, about the burning of the Kuwaiti old fields by retreating Iraqi troops after the 1991 Gulf War. Many of the other artworks seem to record the aftermath or precedence of some traumatic event. read more
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