If Bruce Silverstein’s group show avoids exercising the gallerist’s personality in favor of a team of international curators, Michael Mazzeo hides his curatorial influence behind the personalities and preferences of the photographers themselves. Every photographer in “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” is represented by 1-3 images (or, in one case, a sculpture) and […]
I like group photography shows for two reasons. As quick visual surveys, they provide leads to a wide variety of artists who may or may not be worth contemplating. They also give you a good sense of a gallery’s direction as a whole: what kinds of photographers, subjects, and stylistic considerations a gallery […]
Conscientious has an excellent summary-plus-opinion post on the unfolding scandal of Jill Greenberg’s flagrant violation of the standards of ethical journalism. I’ve refrained from reviewing Greenberg’s work before, primarily because I’ve felt that anyone with any taste or sophistication can only come away from her shows with one impression: that Greenberg’s work is tacky […]
The great thing about a television program devoted to the critique of images is that it is, necessarily, composed largely of images itself. That’s what makes looking at “Consuming Images,” a PBS special with Bill Moyers from 1990, such an interesting experience. (The whole thing is available in six parts here, as part […]
I ordered Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography some time ago, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it until recently. For some reason–and maybe I just haven’t heard about it?–Flusser doesn’t seem to have much of a U.S. following, which may have kept me from delving into the book as quickly as […]
Max Neuhaus is best known for his sound installations–a term he coined himself–that involve concealed speakers generating intermittent and overlapping tones in public places. What brings him within the purview of this visually-oriented blog is a show at the Menil Collection entitled “Circumscription Drawings,” after the name Neuhaus gives to the visual aspect of […]
A man stands in a church, straddling the elaborate miniature landscape of a tiny Nativity scene. He is leaning on a mop with its bottom so lost among figurines that the handle looks like a wooden staff and the man like a tired traveler–the fourth Magus, maybe, or even, when compared to the tiny […]
Fandom is complex. It may begin as admiration–for talent, for style, for success–but the twists and turns it takes as it grows or extinguishes, and especially as it is nurtured into an obsession, have been largely uncharted waters for visual artists. There are signs that that’s changing. Ryan McGinley explored Morrissey fans […]
If Carolina Nitsch Project Room isn’t the smallest storefront gallery in Chelsea, it must be in the top three. Maybe that’s what makes it so successful. Every time I go, it’s packed with an interesting show that is just big enough to contain something worthwhile but still small enough not to get on […]
“Looking Through the Lens” is a show that succeeds even as it fails. The exhibition, which closes Sunday, is the Baltimore Museum of Art’s first major, long-term photographic survey, covering roughly the first half of the twentieth century.
Any survey of this kind should be understood primarily as an educational tool. There’s no radical […]
