ART

Dan Howland disappeared from San Diego sometime in the late 90s and reappeared in Portland, OR, where he is said to have authored an amusement-ride quarterly journal. This classic is reproduced as it originally appeared in Gallery News in 1994…as it is an image and we are not about to type it in. A friend […]

Pearl Paint on Canal Street in NYC was the artists’ Mecca for eighty years, with its assemblage of tumbledown warehouses and 1820s townhouses, selling every sort of paint and brush and picture album and canvas-stretching doodad in the Known World. When it closed in 2014, people were  left bereft. Where now to buy your non-repro […]

In the never-ending search for some socially redeeming purpose in “art”—I don’t mean actual creations in sculpture, portraiture, illustration, music, etc.; but layabout-supporting grants and foundations—someone in England has decided the art thing might be good for dementia. From Museum Next: In recent years, museums have trialled [sic] and tested a broad range of initiatives […]

Sotheby’s sales for 2021 surpass $7.3bn, the highest total in company history, reports theartnewspaper.com. Proving once again that Art is Bigger Than Ever! In part, the eBay syndrome seems to be at work: people will gladly bid twice as much online for a piece they’d scarcely look at in real life. Nevertheless, only a piddling […]

From The Art Newspaper: Rembrandt’s preliminary sketch for The Night Watch (1642) has been discovered beneath the surface of the paint, using the latest scientific techniques. Conservators at the Rijksmuseum have also determined the worrying extent of a rippling deformation of the canvas, which was caused when the picture was moved during building work in […]

In Qatar, of all places. “The exhibition title is borrowed from a 1985 American satirical comedy film of the same name directed by Albert Brooks, about a 1980s yuppie couple in Los Angeles who are disgruntled by their bourgeois lifestyle. Koons wants viewers to draw their own interpretations of that title, as well as the […]

Ever since they removed the British Library from the British Museum, the Museum’s two biggest attractions are the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles. Maybe the Stone and Marbles have always been the biggest attractions these past hundred, two hundred, whatever years. I mean apart from traveling exhibitions of King Tut’s knickknacks and terra-cotta Chinese soldiers, and such like. Though […]

Sotheby’s, the auction house formerly known as Sotheby Parke Bernet, and before that as Sotheby’s, is testing out art sales with cryptocurrency. Just to see how it goes, they’re starting off with some Banksy crap. Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to be the Coins of the Realm at the moment, but no doubt Dogecoin and Monero […]

A list of the 101 most important painters of the history of Western Painting, from 13th century to 21st century by theartwolf.com Although this list stems from a deep study of the painters, their contribution to Western painting, and their influence on later artists; we are aware that objectivity does not exist in Art, so […]

In my life I think I’ve enjoyed exactly two exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, and both were traveling shows for Grant Wood. Otherwise the Whitney was enjoyable mainly for its Permanent Collection, full of familiar figurative paintings by the likes of George Tooker and Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton. Also one or two Gerald Murphy collages, […]

Famous gay painter and pastel illustrator David Hockney has some medical news for us all. Of course we already knew that cigarette smoking prevented Alzheimer’s Disease. But this is the first time an important artist has weighed in on the COVID-19 nonsense and how coffin nails may help! From the New York Post:

“I’m gearing up for a conversation with my landlord,” says dealer Cristin Tierney who operates an eponymous gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. Read the whole thing here. (Hat tip to theartnewspaper.com.)

Well I see the new Whitney has an Andy Warhol show going on, and I really must get down there, in my fabled guise of Art Reviewer. Stay tuned. The Atlantic recently did a nice piece on Andy, far superior to most of what one reads in that rag. (I’ll give a link farther down.) […]