Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, up now at the Metropolitan Museum, attempts to connect the two Italian fashion designers
Bio: Grace-Yvette Gemmell is a cultural and art historian and writer living in New York City. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at Cornell University and is a curatorial researcher at The Museum of the City of New York.
So we have two renegades, and admirable renegades at that, but their respective revolts are undertaken with more dissimilarity than the exhibition would have one believe. Harold Koda, one of the show’s curators, admitted in a press preview this week that the conversations produced in the exhibit come off more like two women talking at each other rather than to each other. More
Posted on May 11th, 2012 4:26pm
A new exhibition at the Japan Society, Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945, (on view now through June 10; a trailer can be seen here) offers a peek into the ephemera and artifacts of the golden age of Art Deco in Japan, a time during which the style dominated both popular and high-cultural aesthetics. The exhibition is the first of its kind in America. It includes a broad survey of some 200 objects (from the worlds of both high- and mass-culture) from the period. More
Posted on April 11th, 2012 2:56pm
The art world appears to be having a memento mori moment: transience, collapse, erosion, and entropy are all themes that have recently been cropping up in shows across the city. Now we have Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design at the Museum of Art and Design (on through August 12), which takes detritus as a broad metaphor for ephemerality, effacement, memory, and mass consumption. More
Posted on March 29th, 2012 9:55am
“My work tries to make sense out of postproduction,” the Frankfurt-based Michael Riedel, 39, told me when I spoke with him at his solo show in the David Zwirner Armory Show booth on Saturday. “Postproduction here is the action itself. All of my work is related to one idea. Each of my works draws on the notion of postproduction, but they do so through the use of different media.” Restaging, translation, repeated lists, and duplication are major themes that continually appear in Riedel’s work, which often, as in the Zwirner exhibit, takes the form of text and images taken from a variety of sources and composed into graphic, geometric images. More
Posted on March 14th, 2012 12:11pm
Paddle8 is attempting to offer a new point of entry to the art fair. Through March 18, Paddle8’s Armory Show website gives those who sign up access to works presented by 120 of the international exhibitors who participated in last week’s show—or whatever hasn't been sold yet—as well as a clutch of artworks presented exclusively online. The collaboration with Paddle8 marks the first time in the Armory's history that it has included an online component. More
Posted on March 13th, 2012 2:05pm
The snow globe as a cultural object is nostalgia itself, with scenes of wintry cliché that never change and where it’s always White Christmas. In the guise of a sentimental, sugar-coated terrain these landscapes disorient in their narratives of alienation and very dark humor. More
Posted on February 21st, 2012 9:01am
