Unrest in Egypt? New York’s Mike Weiss Gallery has it covered. The boys acting up in the streets of Cairo?  Christian Vincent is on the case.  Well that’s the message received yesterday from the gallery’s director Anna Ortt.  The urgent e-mail tunes us in: “Media Alert: Parallel between painting exhibition in New York and riots [...]

When the Nazi army rolled over Paris in late spring, 1940, and occupied the city on June 14, 1940, one might say the lights went out in the world’s greatest cultural beacon. But the truth is more complex, morally and aesthetically, as artists, performers, writers and others in the Paris culture industry either co-existed or [...]

The title of this post is deceptive. Sorry. I actually saw thousands of photographs at the annual photo bash in Paris, Paris Photo, (Nov. 18-21), but 12 photographs (or groups of photographs) caught my eye as I wandered through the offerings at the Carrousel du Louvre.  Among the thousands, there were hundreds of images from [...]

Does contemporary art swing from one pole of “everything” to its opposite of “nothing”?  This very casual notion stems from two French artists, Yves Klein and Arman.  In the late 1950s Klein famously exhibited “Le Vide” (The Void), an empty space “sensitized” by the artist, at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris. About a year later, [...]

“Are you lonely?” asks my British hostess during a dinner at her home in London. The question issues from a conversation about loss, death, and in some indirect way how loss eviscerates the landscape of the mind and heart and makes social networks and chance encounters both meaningful and empty. My hostess explains she’s suffering [...]

It’s hard to be a bad boy in the art world these days, but Mike Ballard is trying. His installation “Whose Coat Is That Jacket You’re Wearing?” fulfills a contemporary art world wet dream: A crowded display of illegally-gained goods (Armani, Diesel and other expensive brand name leather jackets, parkas, sport coats) and their contents [...]

London, Kensington Gardens, August, Sunday, blue skies, warmish. Just off the entrance to The Serpentine Gallery stands a temporary pavilion in hospital white.  I approach the small building just as one of the last English heartbeats is recorded for posterity; that is, copied to a fat hard drive to be added to yet another fat [...]

I spent a week in London in August, and each day attempted to focus on a substantial outing, an interesting exhibition.  My first jaunt was to cross Kensington Gardens to The Serpentine Gallery where the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans put on something of a retrospective, an expansive display of his alchemical results with photography. The [...]